


The Uses of Absence

by SweetLateJuliet



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Anal Sex, Angst, First Time, Fluff, Hand Jobs, M/M, Oral Sex, Post Reichenbach, Resolved Sexual Tension, Romance, Slash, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-04
Updated: 2013-12-22
Packaged: 2017-12-10 09:27:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 46,643
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/784488
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SweetLateJuliet/pseuds/SweetLateJuliet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John is crushed by Sherlock's suicide. At least they weren't lovers on top of everything else... right? Absence makes two hearts grow fonder, but at 221B love can be a dangerous disadvantage.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Maybe you’re better off now that he wasn’t really your boyfriend, yeah?"

The night before Sherlock Holmes stepped off the roof of St. Bart’s was the last night John Watson slept in his own bed.

On that oppressive, surreal day of waiting in hospital and being kept from his friend – his friend’s _body_ , he knew, but couldn’t hold that thought too long – he paced between uncomfortable chairs in several lounge areas and waited. He wasn’t sure what he was waiting _for_ _(someone to say it wasn’t so)_ , but the idea of leaving the place that Sherlock was didn’t cross his mind.

People flowed around him – nurses, a chaplain, police officers – maybe even talked to him, but none of them were Sherlock, so none of their words carried across the yawning void that had opened around him.

Hours passed; John didn’t feel them. The world moved in discontinuous jumps. Each time he started to experience moment piling upon moment, a panic would bloom in his chest as the _absence_ that shocked him in the first moment persisted into the next one, and the next and the next, terrible in its constancy. His mind fled to the numbness before the panic grew too large. _Just wait,_ a silent voice said _. Don’t give in to it yet. Breathe._

At some point he realized Detective Inspector Lestrade was sitting next to him, making words.

“– had no idea… When the chief told me to pick him up, I thought it’d be a formality. I didn’t know it would set him off like that. God, I wish –”

What was he on about? The arrest? It was a million years ago, part of the whole world of things that No Longer Mattered.

Lestrade was still speaking. “– know I don’t know the particulars of you two’s … your … God, John, you look wrecked. If there’s anything at all –”

John closed his eyes and let Greg recede. When he opened them some time later he was alone.

Once there was a cool weight on his left hand: another hand, a woman’s. He stared at it intently, trying to parse its meaning, until finally it squeezed once and drew away.

The next time the world shifted into focus, there was a cool paper cup of tea and an untouched plate of congealed meat and veg on the table beside him.

It was well after dark before one of Mycroft’s associates escorted John to a car and back to Baker Street. The trip was quiet and tensionless, a world apart from the anxiety that had churned his stomach on the frantic cab ride to St. Bart’s earlier in the day. Sherlock had jumped off the building while John watched and was now dead. In retrospect, John’s anxiety had been quaintly inadequate.

At the flat, Mrs. Hudson shepherded him in. He sat at her table, shell-shocked and still, as she wept, fixed tea, cursed Moriarty in her gentle voice, and tried to engage him.

“I just can’t believe it. I can’t!” she said.

“You and Sherlock are the best things that’ve happened around here since … well since I don’t know.” She poured tea.

“What could he have been thinking? My poor Sherlock!” She dabbed at her eyes.

“You know, I’d always hoped that you boys would… You just seemed such a pair.” She patted his hand.

“Why, John? Why did he do it? Surely he didn’t care so much what people thought.” Then, plaintively, “What will we do?” She didn’t seem to expect an answer.

Good, because he had none.

Finally after 2 a.m., John hugged Mrs. Hudson and stumbled upstairs to his own chair. He sat there, motionless and sleepless, until a weak dawn leaked in the windows. His thoughts were formless save a mantra of _why Sherlock why._ By first light, he was nursing a raging headache. The pain was welcome.

Later that day John visited Molly in the morgue to hear her confirm that Sherlock was gone.  She was even more ill-at-ease than usual. Mycroft had already claimed the body, she said. _The body_ , John thought. All that remained of _the mind_ and _the man_. It hit him like a physical blow. Molly’s face crumpled and she reached for him. John muttered something kind and made a hasty exit before she cried. She had cared for Sherlock too, but god, he couldn’t comfort anyone else right now.

He found himself back at the flat without remembering how he got there. He stood in the living room staring at the debris of Sherlock’s life: psychology journals lying facedown and open, the milk left out to spoil (again), the skull on the mantle, the music stand by the window. All of these things would now sit just where they were indefinitely unless he, John, touched them. Sherlock’s impatient grace and genius ennui were gone from the world. John pressed his fingers into his eyes until he saw stars. If he started crying now, there might be no stopping.

He decided quickly: He would go. He strode up to his room and dug a duffle from the closet, grabbed whatever clothes were to hand, and stuffed them in. There was the Sig in the locked safe under the bed... His lips parted at the thought of that cool black barrel. _That_ desire would only grow stronger in the days to come; best to leave it.

He could always come back.

John took the bag to the loo and opened the cupboard to get his toiletries – but his overwrought mind hadn’t counted on this being a shared space. Sherlock’s toothbrush, his cologne, and the ridiculous scar makeup he’d used months ago to disguise his fine features all sat on the shelves, mocking John with their stillness, their reminder that _Sherlock was just here_. John gripped the sides of the sink until his knuckles went white and dropped his head. Surely it would help if he could just vomit.

After several deep breaths, he straightened up and sorted out his toiletries. Not much was his, really. He wrenched the safety cap off a bottle of paracetamol and downed a handful dry. The rest of the bottle went into his bag.

He walked back to the living room. It felt dreadfully significant to take the spoilt milk to the kitchen and pour it out one last time.

This was it, then. It seemed like he should say something.

“Goodbye, Sherlock. You are… you were…”

What did he even mean? This place, with Sherlock in it, was everything. Without him? John turned to leave.

His crystal ashtray was on the table by the couch. He swept it into his duffle as he walked out.

~~~

John walked the streets of London through a long afternoon and twilight, duffle slung over his back, and finally settled on a bus bench in a neighborhood he didn’t recognize. His headache had become visible, a black fog at the edges of his vision.

It was hard to think clearly about the present when he remembered Sherlock in so many vivid shades of _alive_ : Racing down a damp alley. Inhaling the story in a takeaway box on a suspect’s table. Pointing to the light in the window where they would find the missing boy. Scribbling notes and rests on paper while those notes and rests yet trembled in the air. Intently searching John’s face with a mixture of surprise and amusement.

Bus after bus came by, the drivers eyeing John impatiently or expectantly through open doors until they realized he was somewhere else.

Why had Sherlock given it all up? John couldn’t make himself believe it was willingly, no matter what Sherlock had said in those last moments. Moriarty, it must have been something to do with Moriarty… The pounding in his head prevented John from delving any deeper. He pressed his elbows into his thighs and crushed his temples between the heels of his hands.

John sensed motion near him and raised his head. A stout, bearded man in a wool coat was extending an arm near John. “Bless you, my friend,” the man murmured as he placed a pound coin on the bench.

John’s mind made the expected protest – _no, no, I’m not homeless_ – but John himself just watched silently and caressed the coin. The man was already moving away down the block.

Homeless: Yes. Rootless. Empty, again. John had been a shell of himself when he was invalided out of Afghanistan. Sherlock had filled the big gaps, and unnoticed he had insinuated himself into all the small ones as well. In less than a day he had become John’s flatmate, colleague, and most interesting diversion. A week later he was a _friend_. Sometime after that, John’s work-life balance had become a calculus of whether Sherlock more desperately needed a new case or a quart of milk. With him gone, the structure of John’s life was suddenly fragile and hollow as sparrow bones. Perhaps it wasn’t so odd that people had always assumed they were a couple.

Never again. In his mind’s eye, John saw Sherlock’s blind stare and blood-matted hair. The memory was as crushing as the experience. No; it was worse without the initial disbelief to deaden the blow. He was seated and still he wanted to fall to his knees.

John imagined himself reaching for a door.

Sherlock had had a mind palace where he stored reams of information for later recall. When John learned of it, he had imagined the detective dashing through a sprawling Victorian manse peering at carousel parts, mounted skeletons, and period flatware.

John himself had only one mental room. It was a heavily fortified, poorly lit place for stuffing things he never wanted to think of again. The room was full of dead patients, soldiers and friends. They had been bloodied and torn by every kind of horror: bullets, cancer, IEDs, a man’s bare hands. It was less a crypt than an abattoir. John saw himself resting his hand on the doorknob and staring down at Sherlock’s long, lifeless body.

 _Goodbye, John_ , he’d said. His last words.

 _Goodbye, Sherlock_ , John replied now. _You were a chapter in my life. The best one, I think._

In the London twilight, John squared his shoulders and pushed against the bus bench to rise to his feet. His head throbbed mightily and he staggered a step. What was left after the best chapter of your life? He blew out all the air in his lungs. _Off to write a too-long epilogue, then._

Perhaps there was another consulting detective somewhere in the world that needed a chronicler, an agent, a cheerleader, a conscience. A live-in. The thought was too depressing for words.

Sick people. There were always sick people. John set off for the clinic, figurative hat in hand, to ask Sarah for his job back. He didn’t know if he was still fit for doctoring, but at least he’d be able to stow his duffle in the staff room and lie down on a couch. Try to sleep.

In the back of John’s mind, Sherlock’s body still lay outside that room. He needed just a while longer.

~~~

The first day in clinic was both endless and a blur. “When did you first notice it?” Dr. Watson would ask a patient. “How long has this been bothering you?” “Has Violet’s throat always been this color?” Each time he would respond to their uncertainty competently and with compassion. Each time he would think: Funny how they can fail to notice how or when their physical symptoms started. John knew exactly when his headache had begun.

He took doses of paracetamol on an accelerated schedule, then double doses, then triple, until he began to have a care for his liver. It was a skill that had been useful after his military service, this drive toward self-preservation even when the alternative was so seductive. After that he just settled in to the headache.

A few days later, he took the afternoon off, swathed himself in a suit grown loose, and got a cab to Wemberly and Son Funeral Parlor.

The service was a hellish farce of spiritual claptrap and ambiguous eulogy. The funeral director seemed uncertain whether it was appropriate to say anything positive about the fraudulent deceased. John counted five people there who truly mourned Sherlock: himself, Mike Stamford, Molly Hooper, Greg Lestrade, and of course Mrs. Hudson. You couldn’t tell about Mycroft and the elderly Mrs. Holmes, who may have just been keeping up appearances. Even people whose lives or families Sherlock had saved talked knowingly to the reporters in the vestibule about how deceived they had been. The closed casket thwarted even the small solace of seeing Sherlock’s face one more time. John’s headache was skull-cracking.

Afterward he pushed through the crowd and out the back door to lean against the brick wall and relish the bite of the wind. He felt guilty about avoiding Greg and Molly, but he feared collapsing under their concern. It was all he could to do interact superficially with unfamiliar patients and the man at the takeaway till each day – people who saw a quiet bloke rather than the burned-out shell he was.

As John checked his mobile, Mycroft appeared beside him. One voicemail. John punched in the passcode and wordlessly took the cigarette Mycroft offered. Full tar. He held it out to be lit as the message started.

 “Hi John. Erm, it’s Jeanette. Your ex, the … teacher. Without a dog. Ha. Sorry. Anyway. I’ve seen all the news and I just wanted to say I’m sorry about Sherlock. I know that you cared. Maybe you’re better off now that he wasn’t really your boyfriend, yeah? Ha. Sorry, that was dumb. Anyway. I’m so sorry how that turned out, and if you ever want to get together –”

John jerked the phone away from his ear and punched Delete. A sudden rage sparked from the headache and licked through his veins. “Better off? _Better off?_ That sodding _cow_!” The tremor in his right hand launched a fine shower of ash and ember into the wind.

Mycroft was nonplussed. “Hmm, John? Someone thinks my brother is better off dead?”

“No! My bloody ex-girlfriend thinks _I’m_ better off now since Sherlock wasn’t my …” The rage evaporated quick as it had come. “… you know. Since we weren’t … together.”

“Ah. Attempting to comfort you by pointing out avoided emotional trauma.”

“Yes! Bloody stupid. As if this could –” He stopped. The rest was _be any worse_ , and he didn’t want to discuss it with Mycroft.

Mycroft knew. Fraught silence was a professional specialty. “She’s right, though, John. I did sometimes wonder if my brother fancied you. It’s for the best now that you didn’t reciprocate.”

John gaped at Mycroft. Sherlock? Fancy _him_? It would be laughable if it wasn’t so bloody odd. “Really, I don’t think I was his type, Mycroft.”

Mycroft’s lips compressed in the smallest smile. “How can we know now what might have been? For the best.” He crushed his cigarette neatly underfoot, smoothed his lapels, and glided back into the building.

John leaned his head against the cool brick and closed his eyes. _For the best._ Hadn’t Mrs. Hudson said something like that too? Even Greg? Did absolutely everyone think the suicide of his best friend was somehow easier because he hadn’t shagged him? They had lived together, spent almost all their time together, understood one another uniquely. Could he really feel more broken and alone now if they had also kissed? Flirted? Touched?

Unbidden, he remembered the press of Sherlock’s long fingers around his hand, dragging him through alleyways, still clinging even as they paused to catch their breath. They’d been handcuffed together, though.

He thought of the bemused but pleased expression Sherlock sometimes developed while reading a particularly effusive blog post over his shoulder. “You are quite impressed with me, John,” he’d murmured once, a touch of wonder and none of the usual smugness in his tone. John had grinned stupidly at the screen because it was true.

There was the way the detective would suddenly flare his nostrils, waggle his brows and do a _sotto voce_ Anderson impression to make John laugh when it Was Not Appropriate. How he was somehow always awake in the shadowy living room when John fled there from a nightmare of war, and would stand at the window and deduce passersby aloud until the rhythmic baritone and boring lives soothed John’s shaken heart. The absolutely sophomoric jokes they’d taken to making when they squeezed past one another on the stairs to the flat. (“My, John, Tesco had a sale on sausage?” “Sherlock, this case has quite aroused your, ahem, curiosity.”)

If any woman had done all of these perfect things John would have kissed her ages ago.

Which begged the question.

_What would it have been like?_

And finally his weary mind could do nothing but answer.

He saw himself stepping close to his tall flatmate, eyes falling closed as he leaned in and up.

Brushing his nose along Sherlock’s as his face drew near.

Pressing his lips to that genius mouth –

Nope. Nnnope. Fantasy-Sherlock had pulled back, eyeing him with equal parts suspicion and concern. Fantasy-John felt sheepish. Real-John smiled despite the headache.

But then, in that consider-all-the-possibilities way he’d learnt from Sherlock, he methodically wondered how he would have reacted if it was instead Sherlock leaning in. ( _“Let us suppose, John, that_ I _wanted to kiss_ you _.”_ )

Perhaps Sherlock’s gaze would capture his, intense and searching.

A long, graceful hand might reach deliberately behind his head to rake through his hair and tilt his face up.

A scarlet flush could bloom on those chiseled cheekbones.

Alabaster skin would loom closer, filling his vision, as he drank in that distinctively Sherlock scent of rosin, wind, and methylated spirits and held it in his lungs like smoke.

He’d feel the warmth of a breath... the pressure of still lips against his... and the stirrings of movement. There’d be the shocking intimacy of staring into Sherlock’s blue-grey eyes the whole time, because of course the man wouldn’t close them for a first kiss.

And _that_ sent a jolt of arousal right through John’s chest and all the way down.

His hand jerked as the forgotten cigarette burned his fingers. An inch of ash disintegrated and fell on his shoe. A little grunt escaped with the breath he hadn’t known he’d been holding.

Well. That was unexpected. But it wasn’t as if it meant…

Or if it mattered now.

As if Sherlock would have gone for that anyway.

The back door opened and Molly Hooper shouldered through, peering back into the building. She looked like she was sneaking. She stepped out, sighing.

“Hi Molly,” John said quickly. _Would she know what he had been thinking?_

Molly squeaked, jumped, and whirled to face him, smacking her elbow on the closing door. “Ow! Uh, John! Hi! I didn’t think –” She flushed and broke off abruptly. “Never mind. Um, how are you?”

He made a grimace that was meant for a smile. “OK, thanks.” She eyed him skeptically, rubbing her elbow. “Bit not good, I guess,” he amended.

“Yes, of course. It’s terrible. W- I’ve – been worried about you. So sorry I haven’t dropped by. I really ought to have brought you some food. A ham, could I bring you a ham?”

John shook his head. “Thanks, though. How are you doing?”

“Me? I’m fine, why?”

“He was your friend too. He was a real prat to you sometimes, but you know him. He really did like you.”

“Oh. I know. I mean. Sorry, I’m terrible at this. Well, I won’t keep you. Let me know if you need anything, alright?” She darted back inside without waiting for an answer.

Strange. He needn’t have worried about Molly guessing his errant thoughts _or_ doing him in with her concern. And yet he felt somehow comforted by a conversation that he didn’t quite follow and ended in the middle.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, there it is, I’m officially a fanfiction author. I’d love to hear your thoughts!


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _John. Dear, good John. It will be over soon. Then things can go back to normal._

A lanky young man in full football kit bounded up the stairs to his flat two at a time, one hand at his chest and the other at a hip to stop the shiny red duffle slung across his body from bouncing. Tall blue socks slouched into classic black-and-white Sambas. A red elastic band at the crown of his head held back sleek dark hair, and mirrored sunglasses hid his eyes. A struggling shadow of stubble and a snug wood-beaded necklace completed the look.

Sherlock Holmes looked all of twenty and a bit of a tosser in his footballer get-up. That was the point. People rolled their eyes and looked away instead of giving him a second look. It was trivial to hide in plain sight, even from Moriarty’s associates. People generally saw what they expected to.

He resisted the urge to slam the flat door. He was irritable out of all proportion to the circumstances.

This was not in itself unusual. His irritability usually corresponded loosely to circumstance but directly, and exponentially, to the time since he’d had a case. But he did have a case now, sort of. He had three assassins to find and neutralize before it came out that he was alive and Moriarty was not, as well as the tricky task of proving a negative – that there weren’t additional booby traps lain by Moriarty to spring once Sherlock proved to not be dead.

The detective stripped down to his boxer shorts and flopped onto the shabby couch with his laptop. Without his well-loved dressing gown, he spent a lot of time in this new flat nearly naked, trying to dissipate the lingering slovenliness borne of so many untailored disguises.

The trouble was, the “case” didn’t interest him. Three career criminals had been hired to do a job, and the only unknowns were their particular identities and whether any of them had enough of an honour-among-thieves ethos to revisit a fulfilled contract in light of new information. It was straightforward. Boring. He’d almost feel comfortable handing it off to the Met.

It had been child’s play to identify them. Mycroft had retrieved Moriarty’s mobile when he supervised that surreptitious cleanup, then passed it on to Sherlock with the new laptop and a first round of while-you’re-gone supplies. When the phone wasn’t even locked Sherlock had feared some dastardly surprise, but further investigation confirmed an appalling lack of ante-mortem cleverness. Moriarty had been supremely confident that he had won. He simply hadn’t planned for being outwitted, or long outlived. It was disappointing.

The mobile had seven outgoing calls after the texted invitation from Sherlock. A Mycroft-assisted GPS history on the recipients showed that three of these contacts had been in the right locations that afternoon: one had loitered around 221 Baker Street, one was stationary at New Scotland Yard, and one had traveled from St. Bart’s to Baker Street and back.

Further, in the weeks leading up to the confrontation, the phone from the Yard had spent a significant number of daytime hours there and most of its nights at an address in Paddington not far from Lestrade’s flat. The address was recently rented to one Constable Manning, a new hire at the Met.

Bah. This computer work was John’s domain. Sherlock longed to be out dashing through the city, touching and smelling things, _being seen_. But his hands were tied. A miscalculation could still mean John’s life, or Mrs. Hudson’s or Lestrade’s.

The laptop was burning the flesh of his thighs. He pushed it tetchily onto the couch and hugged his knees to his chest.

Though the Constable Manning deduction had been elementary, the solution should have given him at least a momentary thrill. When it didn’t, Sherlock had turned his deductive faculties inward. He came to the unsettling conclusion that his irritability was related to John’s absence. For going on two weeks, Sherlock had relied on Mycroft for everything – the flat, the clothes, the technology. In that time, no one had called Sherlock brilliant, no one had fixed him tea, and no one had casually failed to notice his petulant snits then distracted him with a question about the progression of rigor mortis in seawater. Certainly he enjoyed John’s company, but to have his equilibrium depend upon it! A regrettable weakness.

Worst of all was the niggling worry that the situation might prove permanent. John had rejected 221B for some reason and was sleeping at his clinic. When he discovered that Sherlock had deceived him and knowingly caused the pain he seemed to feel, what if he decided not to come back?

Sherlock squeezed his eyes shut and bit his own knee.

~~~

“John. Dr. Watson.” Dr. Sarah Sawyer leaned against the doorway of the locum office. “You can’t live here.” Her voice was kind.

“Ermm,” John said. His tongue darted over his lower lip as he considered denying it. But his duffle of soiled clothes was on the desk and she’d caught him counting pound coins for the launderette. He gave it up as a bad job and just ran a hand through his hair.

Sarah stepped in and moved a takeaway box to perch on a chair. “Haven’t you got someplace to go?”

The only place he wanted to be was home, and that was unbearable. “I can’t… I can’t.”

“A friend you could stay with? A relative? Isn’t there anybody? You need to get some sleep and eat some real food. Honestly, these curries you keep getting make _my_ gut ache.”

John sighed and leaned against the edge of the desk. He’d actually only eaten about half the pungent curries Sarah thought.

The first time he got takeaway and forgot to eat it was a surprise. John had always scheduled his tasks around tea and toast, been what his mum called a good eater. But that night he’d gotten engrossed in theorizing about Moriarty and hadn’t missed the dinner until he saw it untouched on the desk the next morning. As he binned it, he thought of how Sherlock couldn’t be arsed to eat when he was on a case. His heart twisted with a sudden feeling of connection. After that he forgot another meal accidentally-on-purpose to revisit that sweet ache, and again after that. He’d still pick up the takeaway, though, because he knew he was flirting with something dark.

Sarah shifted in the chair. “It’s only been two weeks, John. I don’t even know why you want to be at work. Just go take some time and –”

“And what? Look, I know you mean well, but it helps me to be busy, not just sitting around.”

“You are, though. Sitting around.”

John furrowed his brow at her, confused and miffed.

“Sure, you’re checking sore throats and giving out plasters, but that’s not anything to you now, if it ever was. I was around long enough to see the kind of life you want.”

He hadn’t ever wanted to put a date in mortal danger, but he took the point. Being kidnapped with Sarah, snatching life from the jaws of death, watching Sherlock outmanoeuvre an entire foreign crime syndicate… That much adrenaline coursing through your veins made you feel so _alive_ when you made it through. It had also precipitated quite the rowdy shag. Sarah saw him remembering and smiled wryly.

It had only been two weeks, though. “It’s only been two weeks.”

She smiled wider. “Two weeks of people believing he was a fraud and you’re a mug. What’s long enough?”

“You don’t believe what everyone’s saying?”

“How could I? He’d have to be more of a genius to fake what he does – did – than to do it for real. And you, you have good judgment. Just find someplace else to kip, OK? I’ve still got the couch if you need it.” She got up, pecked him on the cheek, and disappeared down the dimly lit corridor.

~~~

A smooth-cheeked, scholarly chap in a yellow polo shirt and horn-rimmed glasses sat in a restaurant across from a launderette and tried very hard to be _expected._ Order one meat and two veg. Smile at the waiter, not too much. Eat the food. Don’t stare at the other patrons.

God, how did people stand it?

Each time Sherlock looked across the street (not too often, don’t seem overly interested), his jaw tensed at the sight of the slumped figure just two panes of plate glass away. _John. Dear, good John. It will be over soon._ _Then things can go back to normal._

The waiter refilled his water glass and spilled on the table. Sherlock deduced instantly that, while warranted, scowling and name-calling would be _unexpected_. Smiling accommodatingly and excusing the pimple-faced git was _expected._ John’s coaching on these things was proving useful but not at all gratifying. Sherlock smiled accommodatingly.

~~~

Cloth and suds swirled hypnotically. John was a laundry-watcher after two launderette incidents during university (one inconsiderate, one a prank that seemed funny by now, sort of). He slouched in a plastic bucket seat and waited on the wash.

What Sarah had said was true. Sherlock’s death had stalled him, left him in a fog of headache and unshed tears. _Could be dangerous_ , Sherlock had tempted him more than once. John had never considered this particular danger.

A physical wound scarred over. John’s body was well-adorned with these, some faint, some with real topography. His right hand rose to his left shoulder. He could recall the pain of that bullet ripping through muscle and bone but he couldn’t relive the sensations. An emotional wound, though. That could hurt as much as the day your friend hit the pavement any damn time you thought of it.

Enough. He couldn’t save Sherlock but he could try to vindicate him. He found a pen in his jacket, tore a wrinkled concert flyer from the pin board, and started to make notes on the back.

Half a page later, he was reliving an emotional experience of a different sort. Fantasy-Sherlock pressed his mouth against John’s and probed his teeth with his tongue, summoning tension low in John’s belly. Bloody hell, where had that come from? That wouldn’t clear either of their names, everybody already thought that’s what went on at 221B. John shifted in the chair. His jeans were suddenly a touch snug in the crotch. Bloody hell. Ridiculous.

~~~

When the towering tray of dirty dishes leapt free to glance off a chair, splash pasta sauce and beer on diners at four tables including his own and shatter deafeningly on the tile floor, Sherlock sighed happily. The waiter’s spectacular ineptitude was certainly _unexpected,_ so the bespattered patrons were _expected_ to express their displeasure. It was brilliantly cathartic.

The next time he looked across the street, John was gone. Irritability flooded back in an instant.

~~~

“Yes? Who is it?”

John stared at the intercom with his finger on the button. He hadn’t thought to catch her at home right off.

The speaker crackled again. “Hello? Is someone there?”

“Hi, er, yes. It’s… I wanted to talk to you about Sherlock Holmes.”

The silence stretched long. “Who’s this?”

Saying his name didn’t seem like the wisest thing, but there was nothing for it. “John Watson.”

Again the silence. Finally Kitty Riley’s voice came out the tinny speaker. “You can’t come up. But meet me at The Red Lion round the corner in ten minutes. This had better be on the record.”

John chose a pub table where he could watch the door and tucked his bag of clean laundry underneath.

Not much later Kitty entered, notepad in hand. She waved to the barman and surveyed the room until she found John. Then she proceeded to the bar. The barman started filling glasses as Kitty talked, then both of their gazes turned to John. The man fixed John with a hard stare. Possibly a bit threatening. John raised a hand in acknowledgment; the barman just kept glaring. John dropped his hand.

Kitty brought a pair of pints to the table and sat down. “So.”

John claimed a beer. “So.”

They eyed each other over the rims of the glasses. Kitty spoke first. “You wanted to talk about Sherlock Holmes.”

John needed to know where “Richard Brook” was now, how to contact him, whether he was keeping up this terrible ruse now that he’d won. To do this he would be circumspect and dispassionate. He said: “Don’t you feel responsible?”

The contempt in his voice surprised them both. Sherlock’s name in her mouth had been too much.

“Sorry, what?”

He tried again. “Never mind, you thought it was true. He convinced you. Where is he now?”

“You mean Richard.”

“I mean Moriarty. Who you call Richard.”

“You don’t know?”

“That’s why I’m asking!”

“Damn it.” She sighed. “And you think I’m going to give the whereabouts of the key source in the biggest story I’ve ever had to a man who looks capable of murderous revenge.”

Did he look like that? “I need to know what he said. How he made Sherlock do it.”

“John, everybody knows that now. He told me his story and I published it. The truth.”

“And what is he telling you now? Did he seem relieved when he heard Sherlock was dead?” John’s voice had again veered wildly from dispassionate. “Could he hide the glee? _Well?_ ”

She sighed again. “I don’t know. I haven’t talked to him.”

“You haven’t talked to him?” John’s glass thumped onto the table, splashing beer onto his hand. “His story made Sherlock jump off a building, and you didn’t ask him what he thought about that?”

“Of course I tried to ask him! But I haven’t heard from him in ages. Since that night you chased him out of my flat, actually. I’m worried about him.”

It was vertigo-inducing, sitting there at a table with a woman fretting over Moriarty not calling her. John looked closer. Her left fingers worried rhythmically against her thumb. Her mouth was tense. Her downcast eyes shone. There were points of color in her cheeks and a flush on her neck. “Oh god.” The deduction made his head spin. “You fancied him.” She didn’t look up. “You _slept with him._ ”

Kitty grimaced but still wouldn’t meet his eyes. “None of your business. Besides, the story was already going to press.”

“Jesus Christ! He seduced you, you printed his story, and it destroyed Sherlock. Did you even check his goddamned sources?” John was up out of his chair, hands on the table, shouting in Kitty’s face. The barman shot out from behind the bar and started their way.

Question Kitty’s morals, question her judgment, question her choice in men. But question her _fact checking?_ She sprang out of her chair to shout right back at John. “Of course I checked his sources! And every one of them checked out. Every one! The man is a luckless actor employed by your _friend_ in a twisted scheme to make Sherlock famous. It disgusts me. And I’m worried that he did something terrible to him! It’s pitiful that you won’t see it even now.”

They stood there, faces inches from each other and breathing hard. The barman eventually went back behind the bar when it became clear that blows weren’t imminent.

John sat down slowly. He pressed his fingers against his aching head and took a long swallow from the pint. The intensity drained away. “People don’t want to believe someone could be so brilliant. Both of them, really. They’re geniuses, and shouldn’t that be the news? But everyone wants _singular_ to mean _freak_ , and Moriarty played right to that. Wasn’t _that_ bloody brilliant? Him convincing you, and you convincing everybody, that he’s just some wanker luvvy who needed the money. Of course his sources checked out, he’d have made sure of that. But where is he now? You better believe he’s not coming by your flat again. That golden ticket has left the building.”

Kitty retook her chair. Sarcasm dripped from her voice. “Right. And nobody but you can see the ‘truth’ in spite of all the evidence.”

The fight, or at least this fight, had gone out of him. And what she’d said was rather true. “Yeah, I ‘spose. Almost nobody.”

“Well then. Where does that leave us?”

“Just… if you hear from him… tell him I want to talk to him.”

“God, John.” She shook her head, and he could just about hear the _pathetic_. “I will.”

~~~

Greg Lestrade was sautéing onions when there was a knock at his door. That was the problem with a walk-up, just anyone could come to your door. Greg wiped his hands on his trousers and went to the peephole.

Mycroft Holmes? Seeing the man unexpectedly always put Greg on guard. Was it the bereaved brother of the late consulting detective come to call, or the British government? Not that either seemed a particularly sociable choice at his home at this time of night.

Greg opened the door. “Mycroft, what can I do for you?”

Mycroft just looked at him. Was that a neutral expression or disdain? Hard to tell. Maybe disdain was his neutral expression. Maybe he didn’t like the smell of onions.

A movement at the kerb caught Greg’s eye. The door of a dark car opened to disgorge a squat, muscle-bound silhouette. Greg’s eyes darted back to Mycroft. He’d brought a thug? His heartbeat quickened.

Mycroft delicately cleared his throat. “We need to talk about Constable Manning.” He stepped past Greg into the flat, and the hulking figure followed close behind. As soon as the door closed, that figure straightened and somehow lengthened into a pale, slender apparition.

~~~

John was digging in a pocket for his keys as he approached the surgery, so he didn’t see Sarah exiting the building until he almost ran into her.

“John?”

His head jerked up and he froze mid-rummage. Caught again. “Erm, hello?”

“I meant it, you know. It’s not proper.”

“Just one more night. Please. I’ll figure something out tomorrow.”

“Come with me. I’ll make up the couch. I’ll even cook.”

~~~

Lestrade and the Holmes brothers sat in Lestrade’s living room drinking Scotch and paging through an impressively thick file of documents and surveillance images of Constable Manning. Greg chose not to dwell on how Mycroft had obtained quite so much internal Met information.

The file showed that Manning, who was really called Simon Poynter, had joined the Met six months earlier to relay their activities to several criminal elements and discreetly modify case outcomes as desired. Greg suddenly understood how three recent cases had gone arsingly cold. Manning’s desk outside the DI’s office had gotten him a promotion to hitman a couple weeks ago, but he was a white-collar criminal by trade. The Holmes brothers’ lack of concern over him was reassuring. Mostly. Actually it was a bit galling.

“So Moriarty used me as a threat, but didn’t think I warranted a specialist like the others.”

Sherlock nodded. “Third of three, it seems.”

Lestrade didn’t want to throttle Sherlock Holmes as often as everyone else seemed to. But _sometimes_.

Suddenly Greg smiled to himself. _Top three, though._ Then he frowned. This was going to cause him so much paperwork.

~~~

John finished clearing the table while Sarah washed dishes. He topped up her wineglass in companionable silence. If he let his mind float loosely above the circumstances, he could almost imagine himself here for a night with this lovely woman, with a flat and a life and a friend to go back to tomorrow.

He stepped close behind her at the sink and put a hand low on each of her hips. He nuzzled his face into her hair and murmured, “Thank you, Sarah.”

The tap squeaked and the water stopped running. He was jostled about a bit as she reached for a towel, then she leaned back into his chest and let her head fall onto his bad shoulder, eyes closed. He brought his arms together to encircle her waist and craned his neck forward and left, seeking her lips.

She twisted to face him and slid her arms around his neck, settling one hand at the base of his skull. She pressed the length of her body into his and found his mouth with parted lips. He felt rather than heard the faint _mmm_ at the back of her throat.

Her body felt familiar, and warm, and comforting.

And not quite right anymore.

She sensed his hesitation and pulled back to look into his face. “Oh. … _Oh._ ” She searched his eyes a moment longer, then took her hand from his neck to caress his cheek. “Get some sleep, love. I’ll make breakfast in the morning.” The disappointment in her eyes was tempered by a gentle smile. She squeezed his arm, then slipped away to her bedroom and shut the door.

Oh, oh? What exactly had she seen in his face?

John stood in the kitchen until he could muster the energy to brush his teeth. Then he shuffled over to the couch, stripped down, and burrowed under the blankets. _Maybe I’ll dream of before,_ he thought as he drifted to sleep.

He didn’t.

But he did dream of what could never be: kissing Sherlock, long and open-mouthed and hungry. When John woke, he was melancholy, and very hard.

~~~

After Sherlock lost track of John at the launderette, he prevailed upon Mycroft to find John with the surveillance cameras he had access to (pretty much all of them). The result was troubling; John had accompanied Sarah to her flat.

Sherlock tolerated John’s romantic entanglements the way he imagined John bore his more odorous experiments, a bothersome quirk of an otherwise agreeable flatmate. If Sherlock was forced to pick, Sarah might even be the least objectionable of the lot. But the idea of John taking up with her again, now, was frankly alarming.

John already thought of her wistfully. What if she salved his grief and insinuated herself back into his heart? John was easy-going and stalwart. That served well when he was at 221B, but if she charmed him into relocating his belongings and his loyalties, John might stay where he had landed when Sherlock came back.

Many of John’s girlfriends had their knives out for Sherlock, and Sarah had more reason than most. She might be all too ready to convince John that Sherlock’s deception was terrible, cold, and not as necessary as it really was.

And what if she solidified the whole affair by offering John something Sherlock didn’t: physical intimacy?

Sherlock paced his temporary flat in blue linen boxer shorts. The worries swarmed like bees. At times like this it was nearly unbearable to be in his own head.

He’d developed a number of techniques for quieting his mind over the years. He’d already tried the first-line options, including callisthenics, crap telly, and a hundred terms of the Fibonacci sequence. Each attempt had only frustrated him further.

The really effective means available to him now were limited. In a devil’s bargain, he’d given up cocaine five years ago as a condition of becoming Scotland Yard’s consulting detective. He’d chucked the smoking habit recently; the health consequences were just too dire. Prolonged fasting was effective but rarely used because of the time delay. As a tormented teenager he’d experimented with cutting himself a few times, but he disliked both the scars and the care it took to prevent them. His current preferred option was playing the violin, but the instrument was still at home.

The options were worse than limited, actually. The only one left was masturbation. He scowled and clutched his balls through the thin fabric. He began to stroke as he confronted the worrisome thought head-on: John having sex with Sarah.

John stripping off his clothes.

…to reveal a compact, well-muscled chest and strong thighs bracketing a dear little swell of tummy.

John crawling into bed on all fours. Which would make his erect cock sway enticingly.

John leaning down to kiss… someone. For Sherlock, Sarah wasn’t really in it by this time.

John sinking down to his forearms and canting his hips. John entering slowly, buttocks taut with intent. John breathing a low growl of _yes._ Slowly Sherlock’s scowl faded into a look of peaceful concentration.

When Sherlock began to ejaculate into his boxers, the essential kernel of his mind that had never been lulled by cocaine or violin or any of the rest observed that it very much enjoyed this association between John naked, thrusting, and moaning, and Sherlock’s own climax.

 _That_ could be dangerous. It bore further consideration.

~~~

The next morning Sarah served John toast and jam and told him not to come into the clinic for a few days. He protested, but his heart wasn’t in it. He felt vaguely guilty about last night, achingly weary, and poised to sink very, very low.

He parted ways with Sarah at the tube station and made his way to St. Bart’s. The next item on his scribbled list was the rooftop. He had seen Sherlock toss his mobile away; it might still be up there. Maybe it held some clue to why he had done it.

First he stood a block away staring at the empty roofline. Then he retraced his steps to the pavement in front of the building. It was all drizzle-slick cobblestones and bits of city rubbish, with no indication that a man had recently died there. Finally John went inside and took the lift to the top floor. The door to the roof was marked Authorized Personnel Only and locked, but he’d learnt a thing or two about locks from Sherlock, and he stepped out onto the wide flat rooftop in minutes.

A quick survey revealed a large patch of concrete in the middle of the roof that was scoured spotlessly clean, but no phone anywhere.

Perhaps the police had picked it up?

~~~

DI Lestrade’s desk phone rang. He gulped his coffee and grabbed the handset. “Lestrade.”

“Greg, it’s John Watson.”

 _Shit._ “John, how are you doing?” _Keep it together, Greg._

“Please.” Greg heard him draw a shuddering breath. “I need help figuring out what happened to Sherlock. I have to know.”

 _God, the poor man._ “Erm, how do you mean? It’s awful but… pretty straightforward.”

“It had to be Moriarty somehow. Can you help me find him? So I can –” (long pause) “– talk to him? I need to know.”

John sounded desperate and a little unstable. If he started mucking about after Moriarty, he’d draw attention to both himself and Moriarty’s absence. They still knew next to nothing about the gunman with the bullet meant for John, and keeping Moriarty’s death a secret bought them time and options. _Shit shit shit._ What would make John stop? He improvised.

“You’re my friend, John. And I’m worried about you.” He grimaced as he spun the betrayal. “I know it’s hard, but you need to give up this fascination with ‘Moriarty.’ Richard Brook is missing, did you know that? Please, you’ve gotta rethink what you’re willing to hear about Sherlock. The evidence against him just keeps piling up. I think he was really sick. Maybe it’s better –” Greg squeezed his eyes shut and ground the heel of his hand into his forehead “– that he didn’t hurt anyone else before he… you know.” _I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I’ll make it up to you soon._

There was no response. “John?” Greg asked. But the line had gone dead.

“ _Shit_.” Greg immediately dialed the direct number Mycroft had given him. This was so not his division.

~~~

John hadn’t asked after Sherlock’s phone. Greg’s words had cut him to the bone. _That’s one less friend in this world, then._

Aimless now, John made a slow circuit of the roof’s perimeter. When he got to the spot Sherlock had stood, his knees buckled of their own accord. He wrapped his arms around himself and rested his forehead on the low wall. The stone was cool against the headache.

The thought came, calm and strong. _Maybe. Maybe I could jump too._

It would be such a relief. So resonant.

So tragically romantic.

It was the kind of thing star-crossed lovers did, not grieving flatmates or friends.

There in his posture of prayer, John replayed the kisses he’d imagined with a hypothetically willing Sherlock over the last days. They had taken him by surprise at first. Then, tentatively, he’d summoned them. Now he invited them, embellished them, as a welcome refuge from this hopeless reality. How would it have felt to run his hands over Sherlock’s broad shoulders and flat chest? To brush lips and tongue over that long pale neck and feel him moan? To kiss him needily, greedily, as each man fumbled with the other’s trouser fastenings…

That last bit John still couldn’t quite picture. It was like being a virgin again, though; just because he didn’t know how it would go didn’t mean he wasn’t desperate to find out.

The images made John _want_ , but the arousal was shot through with deep despair. These were opportunities forever missed.

He thought of Sherlock’s shining heart well-guarded by an armor of aloofness and incivility, the sweet joy of making the man laugh or smile, the singular beauty of that genius mind. The way his heart had risen when Sherlock named him _friend_ , and the way it had fallen four stories and shattered two weeks ago.

Yes. It didn’t make any sense, but it was the only thing that made sense. He loved Sherlock Holmes. He was _in love_ with Sherlock Holmes.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> John's in love. Sherlock's in lust.

John sat on the rooftop of St. Bart’s for an hour, holding his realization up to the light, examining it from every angle.

_I am in love with Sherlock Holmes. My friend and flatmate. Who is a man. And dead._

He was most surprised by how unsurprising it felt. It was a recognition rather than a revelation. John traced the threads of affection and desire back, and though they narrowed to fine gossamer strands, they were firmly knotted to a January day eighteen months ago and just a few floors below the place he now sat. It had started at the beginning and grown unseen until the end.

But then it was easy to miss the fine things at a hundred miles an hour and high on adrenaline. When absolutely everything else was stripped away, it became possible to see to the heart of it all.

What he felt now must be the same poignant despair that had haunted Sherlock when he first thought Irene Adler was dead. As far as John knew he’d never acted on it, but she’d become The Woman to him then. If absence made the heart grow fonder, death was a fine way to draw out a love lurking under the surface.

 _If only I’d realised sooner_ , John thought _. I could have …_

Could have what? He could have mooned about after his entirely oblivious and quite possibly asexual flatmate, read far too much into the rare thoughtful gesture or kind word, and been disproportionately stung by the offhanded disregard Sherlock distributed so democratically. He could’ve worked himself into a lather over the exquisite angles and expansive planes of a body he would never lay hands on in passion. He could have daydreamed, and fantasised, and eventually let Sherlock break his heart.

_God, I would’ve ended up writing bad poetry. He would’ve hated it._

But he’d realised it too late to experience any of that. Now he could fantasise and idealise all he wanted; Sherlock was forever spared the indignity, and John’s heart was broken from the start.

_I got it backwards. I always did, with him. He’d show me the evidence, and I’d miss the most important bits, pick out a few of the right things, and then put everything together in the wrong way. I needed him to make sense of it all._

John sat quietly and stared into the empty sky. His thoughts spiraled out into formless swirls of love and loss.

Eventually the physicality of the world crept back in. John was getting chilly and hungry on the roof, his face felt wind-burned, and his arse was sore. At least the headache seemed to finally be loosening its grip.

What now? He had a fleeting desire to go back home and bury his face in Sherlock’s textiles. But the memory of the anguish he’d last felt there was still too strong. No, this kaleidoscope of love and despair demanded to be shared with someone who’d walked her own path to hell and back.

~~~

A sallow-faced, paunchy businessman in an ill-fitting suit sat on the side of a planter outside a cheap hotel and dabbed at the blood on his fat lip with his right hand. He slouched, not looking as tall as he was. There was second-hand lipstick smeared about his lips. With his left thumb, he worried at the white-gold band on his left ring finger.

“This man that threatened you, what did he look like?” asked Police Constable Singh. She was scribbling on her notepad as though her career depended on it. She was so fresh-faced; perhaps it did.

“He didn’t threaten me, he hit me! I think with the butt of a _gun!_ ” whined the businessman. “He was big, and, and bald, and he had _tattoos_. His nose was sharp-looking. He was huge, muscly. I saw him go into a room on my floor, so I got the number and then called 999. Room 217, it was room 217.” Sherlock made sure he saw the numbers being formed upside down on her pad.

“Thank you for alerting us, sir. Since he may have a gun, I’ll be requesting backup before I go talk to him. Now, if I could just get your contact information for my report?”

Sherlock wrote his name down as Mr. P. Anderson and made up an address and mobile number. “Er, if there’s a way we could make it so my wife doesn’t know I was here…” He winked lecherously at PC Singh and watched her struggle to mask her disgust with professional disinterest.

Michal Cervenka, a.k.a. Raul Portofino, a.k.a. The Handyman, a.k.a. – the list was long – _looked_ like a big thug, so it would be easy to get the Met’s attention on him, especially with this helpful pointer. Once they started looking they would find a very checkered past. But there would be no danger today. Cervenka was currently soundly unconscious in his room, working off a sedative slipped into his lunch beverage by businessman Anderson.

Sherlock had been in and out of room 217 earlier in the day. The idiot assassin had left a gun on the bedside table and a worn leather case on the washbasin. The case was full of wristwatches, ladies’ jewelry, and – Sherlock’s jaw had tightened – a few beat-up children’s toys. They were trophies of the people he’d killed. The arrogance, the _sentiment_ of a career killer carrying around a bag of damning evidence was absolutely beyond Sherlock’s science of deduction.

So many of the trinkets had sweet little inscriptions or unique features that even the Metropolitan Police Service would have no difficulty linking the man to enough heinous deeds for a lifetime incarceration. Two down, one to go until _home._

~~~

John stared blankly out the bus window, hand resting on the duffle beside him. He preferred the Tube, but there wasn’t an underground route to Harry’s place in Forest Hill.

The bus stopped and the doors opened. After a long pause, a slender woman with dark, wavy hair appeared at the front. Two heavily laden canvas bags hung from a shoulder. She walked stiffly down the aisle leaning on an aluminum walking stick. John looked a moment too long and ended up meeting her eye. She smiled ruefully and collapsed into the seat in front of him, drawing the cane onto her lap.

“Just started using this bloody thing and I haven’t got the knack of it yet,” she muttered to no one in particular.

“It takes a bit,” John replied.

“Oh?” She turned to face him. Her eyes were large and brown. Her skin was smooth, dewy, and decorated with a light dusting of freckles. Her expression was warm and open. She was, objectively, beautiful.

“I used to have one. I –” He broke off. “Well, I don’t need it anymore.”

“Lucky for you. Mostly I want to chuck it out the window. It’s better than the alternative, I guess.” She smiled winningly. When John made a noncommittal nod, she faced forward again.

A minute later she turned back round. “Sorry, do you know if I get off here or the next stop for The Cut Bar? At the Young Vic? I’m meeting a colleague.”

John searched his mental map for the Young Vic Theatre. “Next stop, but it’s still quite a walk. Will you manage?”

Her smile faltered. “Of course, thank you. I’ll take rests.”

“I could help if you want. Carry the bags?”

“Oh no, I wouldn’t ask it. You’re on your way somewhere. I’ll be fine.” She smiled again. “Fine enough, anyway. I’ll get there.”

“No, really. No one’s expecting me. I’d be happy to help.”

She eyed him a moment. “Alright then, you’ve convinced me. Such a gentleman! Thank you, love.” She stuck a hand back over the seat. “I’m Marya.”

“John.” He smiled and shook her hand politely.

John carried the two heavy bags for the half-mile walk but Marya insisted on taking his duffle (“Please, don’t let me feel entirely useless”), and she managed it alright. When they got to the outdoor terrace, she approached a man with his back to them at a small table, laid a hand on his shoulder, and leaned down to whisper in his ear.

The straight-backed, besuited man had precisely trimmed ginger hair. A long black umbrella lay on the ground to his right.

John threw up his hands and let them fall for a satisfying smack against his thighs. “Really? This is going to keep happening?”

Mycroft turned and gestured. “Dr. Watson, please join me. I took the liberty of ordering you the risotto, or you can have my fishcakes if you prefer.”

Marya retrieved her bags from John with a wink, pecked him on the cheek, and strode off. She left the duffle and the walking stick next to the umbrella.

John stood where he was, weighing the satisfaction he’d get from leaving in a huff. Mycroft raised an eyebrow and turned back to the table.

John was hungry. He walked round and sat.

~~~

Martha Hudson perched on the end of John Watson’s chair in the upstairs flat and massaged her hip. It had been giving her more pains than usual since 221B went empty.

She’d spent the first week in a state of tearful disbelief, and most of the second week imagining the days after John returned. It would be quieter for a while but the two of them would have a cuppa and a natter sometimes, trading Sherlock stories. Eventually he’d find a nice girl, and after that perhaps there would be little ones. The first time she thought of this she’d pictured a wee tow-headed Sherlock barrelling down the stairs, though that was nonsense. _Dotage is making you sentimental, Martha. You quit that._

But when she’d met John at the cemetery a few days ago, it had been clear that it would be too painful for him to return soon, if ever. No tenants meant no rent, and she relied on that to send a bit to her sister in Aldershot. Yet letting the flat again seemed so very like giving up on her boys. It was a pretty pickle.

Cleaning out the fridge was a palatable step regardless of the ultimate fate of the flat; it seemed a kindness rather a betrayal. No one would be eating the oozy lettuce or old eggs, and whatever it was in the plastic bag must’ve been an experiment – it would have taken more than a fortnight to grow quite so much mould – but there was no one now to evaluate the results.

She’d put the six open jam jars on a tray to bring down to her own kitchen. They oughtn’t go to waste, and they reminded her of John.

But now that the fridge was done, she was having a hard time deciding how to proceed. Boxing up the strange books and medical journals, taking down the peculiar artwork, let alone going into their bedrooms (she was pretty certain now they’d used both) – any of these felt like an ending she didn’t want to acknowledge. _I suppose I could show it as furnished. Just see who shows up and decide then._

She pulled back a sheer curtain, wrested open the window, and pushed the To Let sign out onto the bar. It swung jauntily in the breeze, and she saw several heads down on the street turn to look up at it. She resisted a very strong urge to reach out and yank it right back in. _Oh Sherlock, you dear man. I can see how John’s angry with you. I would be too if I wasn’t so old and tired._

She picked up her jam tray to leave, then detoured to the mantle and retrieved the skull. There was furnished and then there was furnished _._ It would be a suitable keepsake of an odd, happy, fleeting time.

~~~

When the risotto was half gone and his hunger no longer so urgent, John began to regret his decision to stay. He resented Mycroft’s continued meddling with his time; he still didn’t know why he’d been brought here. The man’s lack of concern over the way he’d enabled Moriarty’s game was unforgivable. Worst, John had found himself staring at him three times now, searching for resemblances: the angle of the ears, the slightly receding hairline above the left eye, the thoughtful frown. Each one caused a tightness in John’s chest.

The dissimilarities stung just as much. The ruddier complexion, the larger nose, the average cheekbones – each of these said plainly _not Sherlock, never Sherlock._

Mycroft caught him staring the third time. “You look unwell.”

“Yes, well, I’ve recently lost someone I care about. You look the same as ever.”

Mycroft cocked his head and held John’s gaze for an uncomfortably long time. When he spoke, his voice was quiet and halting. “We do not all suffer in the same way. I am … very aware … of the role I played in … what happened to my brother.”

John looked away, chastened.

“I am doing what I can to rectify the situation, and I have several delicate enquiries in progress.” He sipped his lemon water. “It’s come to my attention that you also have been asking after Moriarty. It might facilitate my efforts if you were to exercise some restraint in that pursuit for the moment. Though by all means you should do what you must.”

John snorted. “I can tell when I’m being led. Makes me baulky.” He sighed. “But if you’re really trying to find out why… I don’t doubt you have better means to do that. I can play along for a little while.”

“Thank you, John. When I have anything I can share, you’ll be the first to know.”

John nodded and looked back to his food.

This meant he missed the fourth resemblance, a fleeting and very Holmesian smirk of pleasure with one’s own cleverness _._ Mycroft’s every word had been true, and yet John had gotten exactly the intended impression. “And where were you going before dear Marya waylaid you?”

“King’s College Hospital. For a meeting.” He didn’t have to cooperate with _everything_.

“I’ll have the car drop you there. Splendid, you got lunch and saved a bit of travel time.”

John spooned up three more bites before he spoke again. The bus was so tedious. “But now I’d rather go to Harry’s. In Forest Hill.”

“Of course.” Mycroft cut a delicate bite, chewed, swallowed, dabbed at his mouth. “Might you instead wish to be dropped at Demelza’s flat in Hampstead? Harriet has been spending much of her time there lately.”

 _Sod. It. All._ John never did keep up with family as much as he intended. Harry had mentioned Demi the last time they’d talked, and apparently things had progressed. He scooped risotto aggressively. Now he’d have to phone ahead. “Yes. That will be fine.”

~~~

Sherlock sat in the buff at the tiny table in his flat, lipstick forgotten along with the fat lip. The laptop glowed patiently, but he could think of no queries he hadn’t already tried a hundred variations of.

The entirety of his knowledge about John’s gunman was this: Moriarty called him Jeff, he was still in London, and he was professionally aware of surveillance cameras. The mobile on which he’d received communication from Moriarty was off the networks except for once each day, never the same time, when he must be checking for new instructions. That ping came always from a new place around the city with poor security camera coverage relative to the foot traffic; Mycroft’s facial recognition programs had picked out a hooded figure a few times but no face.

Jeff had contacted Moriarty only once, a text that came a week after St. Bart’s: _Saw the fall. Payment received. Do the doctor anyway?_

When Sherlock saw it he’d clutched the phone so hard the display went wavy. He’d dropped it then out of fear of destroying useful evidence and made so many enraged and terrified movements simultaneously that he’d ended rooted in place, trembling. If this Jeff didn’t play by the rules, Sherlock would lose the game he’d nearly won in the most agonizing way, far worse than being killed himself. _(Is that true? It feels that way. Why does John seem so essential now?)_

Sherlock had visited the location of every mobile contact, his worry mounting with each used disguise and fruitless search. His inspections of libraries and toilets, parks and shops were appearing dangerously more like those of a consulting detective rather than a plebeian loiterer. He had made maps, charts, and lists, but not a single pattern emerged from the data. He hadn’t eaten in three days; at some point he had become very interested in this case indeed. He was increasingly desperate to neutralise this threat before Jeff disappeared completely or became impatient with Moriarty’s silence and answered his own texted question in the affirmative.

He gripped the sides of the laptop screen. “How can I find him? _How?_ ” he beseeched, shaking the computer for emphasis.

But the technology didn’t work that way, and no answer was forthcoming.

Sherlock unhanded the laptop and reached thoughtfully for Moriarty’s phone. _Maybe that’s the wrong question._

~~~

Mycroft lingered at the table, sipping his after-lunch tea. It was a poor substitute for pudding, but some things must be borne.

 _He didn’t ask me out,_ Marya had whispered when they arrived. _Polite, but not a whit of interest._

If John had demonstrated no attraction whatsoever to a woman perfectly calibrated to entice him, it meant one of two things. Either his grief over Sherlock’s death had reached a dangerous and incapacitating level…

…or his interests had been recalibrated.

Mycroft swept his umbrella up with a little toss-and-catch. He was cautiously optimistic.

~~~

The car dropped John outside Demelza’s building, and he wandered to a nearby park to wait out the workday. When he sat on a bench, his hand habitually went to his pocket to check his phone.

No new messages, no new texts, emails that could go right in the trash.

He tapped out a brief text to Harry saying he was in her girlfriend’s neighbourhood, and got an immediate response that Harry would skive off work to meet him.

Then, like a moth to flame, he scrolled through his text exchanges with Sherlock. Half of the ones he’d sent had gone unanswered, half of the answers he’d received had made no sense, and a little bit of that departed soul seemed to linger in every received burst of a dozen characters. Each one was signed _SH_. It was a helpful habit since he had forever been appropriating mobiles. The reminder from Molly to buy milk or the one from Greg that said “Anderson is an ARSEHAT” might have been more noteworthy otherwise.

He stared at the little screen and dreamed up texts that would never appear there, each more improbable than the next:

_It was a magic trick. Home for dinner? SH_

_Greetings from the great beyond. SH_

_I loved you too. SH_

Why had John never given Sherlock his own text tone? It would’ve only been accurate half the time, but still, why had it seemed appropriate to herald _any_ of the singular man’s missives with the same chime that announced a new bill?

Far in the distance, church bells tolled the hour. The sound was weighty and nostalgic and beautiful.

~~~

_Handyman arrested. SH_

> _Excellent. Still nothing new on #3._

  
_Where’s John?_

> _I just had a lovely lunch with him. Dropped him at sister’s new GF’s flat._

  
_Address?_

> _Keep away._

  
_Address._

> _You’re running through disguises too fast. It’s not trivial to make them believable._

  
_ADDRESS._

> _No._

  
~~~

Harry was waiting at the flat when John walked up. She threw open the door and ran out to embrace him. “John! What a lovely surprise! What brings you this way? You got my messages? I’ve been reading all about this dreadful business with Sherlock. It’s ghastly! How are you taking it?”

The torrent of words was disorienting. “I think I’m in love,” was all he managed.

If Harry was fazed by the change of subject she didn’t show it. “Super! Who’s the lucky girl?”

John opened his mouth but nothing came out. His right hand floated up to knead the left side of his chest. In the silence Harry saw the shadows under his eyes, the hollows at his cheekbones, the slump of his shoulders.

“Oh god. Oh my god. Really? How? What a mess. Come in.”

The tiny flat was homey. In it, Harry seemed comfortable and content in a way she hadn’t for years with Clara. She fixed tea and sat with him on the couch. “OK, start at the beginning. No, start at the part where you fancy a man. You have never said one word about this. How long have you been letting everyone think I’m the only queer one in the family?”

John stared into his tea. “I don’t think it’s like that for me. It’s just _him_. Does that happen?”

“Hmm. I would’ve done him. So that’s pretty much the same thing.”

His eyebrows shot up his forehead.

Harry grinned wickedly. “I mean, I totally get the unconventional attraction. My god, his voice alone. I wouldn’t have really, but that’s more about self-preservation. I think you’d ’ve been fine.”

“Er, I don’t follow?”

“Seems like he’d have been dangerous to shag. You know, like a praying mantis.”

John laughed. The sound was raspy and surprising; he’d fallen out of practice. Sherlock would’ve been so chuffed to hear he was thought of as the do-you-then-eat-you type.

“Really, though. He was a looker, but that’s not enough. What’s this about?”

John considered, but the words spilled out almost before he knew what they would be. “He turned my life upside down. Except it’s more like it _was_ upside down and he righted it. You know I was in a bad place. I was depressed, and so alone, and it seemed like there was only one way out…

“Then he swept in and everything about being with him, everything about _him,_ was so brilliant and exciting.” John realised he was smiling. It felt sad but nice. “He made everything different. The limp went away just for having him in my life.” He rubbed his right thigh. “I thought it might come back now. But it hasn’t. He changed me.” It was a relief to say the words aloud.

Harry pressed on. “Still, John, that’s good friends. What makes it love?”

An involuntary image materialised of Sherlock pressed against a wall. His head was thrown back and he moaned prettily while John mouthed his collarbone. John flushed crimson. “I think… that it’s possible to appreciate a person’s attractiveness, their objective attractiveness, even if you personally aren’t attracted to them. And he was. Objectively attractive. And then sometimes you realise that you personally _are_ attracted to them…

“Most everybody was put off by how prickly and rude he was. But that was because he was so much smarter than the rest of us, and people have been cruel to him about it his whole life. They thought he was a freak. Just look at how everyone’s so willing to believe the worst of him now. I could see how it hurt him, even though he’d never say it. I wanted to make it better, I wanted to make people see. I wanted to make _him_ see. When I could make him laugh, when I saw that _he_ saw I knew how amazing he was – I wanted to do that for him forever.

“It kills me that I’ve only realised it now. Though I think he’d be glad of it. I couldn’t ever figure out if he was interested in anyone like that, but if he was there’s no reason it’d be me.” John drew a long breath and pressed his fist into the tightness over his heart.

Harry whistled. Improbable though it was, that sounded like love alright. But: “Why do you keep touching your chest like that?”

“It’s a bit tight, is all.”

“Mmhmm. And you’re going to the GP when?”

“It’s nothing. My mind thinks I have a broken heart.” He smiled sadly.

“John. You are a doctor. You know you do not fool around with chest pain. Especially with the family history. You’ll go in tomorrow?”

John rolled his eyes but nodded. He might even do it; she was right about the family history.

~~~

Sherlock didn’t know where John was, he needed to talk to Mycroft before he could proceed with his idea for finding Jeff, and there wouldn’t be another ping-location to check out until tomorrow. His mind was untenably frantic and he needed to calm it, to _focus_. Sod the Fibonacci and the press-ups. He moved right in for a soothing wank.

He didn’t set out to think about John during. Usually he thought about himself. It was fascinating to catalogue the real-time cascade of complex biological processes that ultimately resulted in an explosive cerebrally encoded neuromuscular response, the orgasmic rush of dopamine and semen. But John had been so unexpectedly _effective_ last time. He did have a care for what John would think if he ever found out, but that need never come up. Sherlock was a master of inscrutability. Though John had been seeing through that more and more…

Really, maybe John would be flattered by the regard. He knew John liked it when women found him sexually attractive. Wouldn’t he be doubly chuffed to know that he incited non-heteronormative interest in someone of Sherlock’s faculties?

At any rate, he knew it pleased John to help him solve cases, and the resolution of this case in particular would matter to John. Being calm and focused helped Sherlock make the right deductions and solve cases. Masturbation helped Sherlock become calm and focused. Ergo, John would be pleased to help him toss off.

 _I’m not sure it all goes together that way,_ the tiny internal voice observed as he groaned and came.

~~~

When Demelza got home, she kissed Harry, hugged John, and set to cooking. Within minutes John didn’t remember he’d just met her. She was sweet, welcoming, and clearly as gone on Harry as Harry was on her. Watching them together was alternately heart-warming and gut-wrenching.

After a lovely dinner with beverages no stronger than long-steeped tea, the women made John a little nest on the couch of the one-bedroom flat. Harry offered John her place in Forest Hill while he sorted things, and he surprised himself by refusing. He suddenly felt a deep yearning to be _home_ , even if home would be a lonely place with only the memory of Sherlock for company.

John lay awake in the twilit living room for a long time thinking of home, and Sherlock, and love.

Inevitably his thoughts turned to the man’s siren body.

He tentatively slid a hand under his waistband as he replayed every imagined kiss, each more passionate than the last. He drew his knees up and out and slipped the hand into his boxers to hold his stiffening cock.

He unbuttoned fantasy-Sherlock’s shirt, pushing hands inside to skim over his chest, moving the fabric aside to mouth his nipples. Mmm, they were pink and small and quickly hard. John rubbed himself with more conviction.

He kissed his way down Sherlock’s stomach and lapped his tongue into the delicate navel. Sherlock’s breathing grew ragged. _Please, John_. Oh yes, Sherlock.

John freed him from his trousers, yanked down his pants. Sherlock was hard before a finger was laid on him. John strangled a groan – _please don’t let Harry and Demi hear this_ – and gripped himself harder.

He encircled Sherlock’s cock with an imagined hand and knelt in front of him. He ran his tongue up the underside, long and perfect as the man, and flicked his tongue over the tip. It twitched and swelled, and Sherlock’s hips jerked. _Please, John, please yes._ John took the head in his mouth. He swirled his tongue over the precome and swallowed, reached up to clutch a buttock with his free hand. He leaned his head forward and slid his mouth down, down. _Please John!_ Sherlock was panting, and writhing, and begging. His hands gripped John’s skull, pulled his hair, pleaded just as much as his words. John sucked, and tongued, and moaned around the cock in his mouth. Sherlock’s excitement aroused him no end, and when Sherlock finally groaned _John, I’m coming, I –_ and devolved into a wordless keen, body shaking, John keened right back around that cock as he sucked and swallowed and bobbed. His heart swelled with a fierce proud joy.

On the couch, John’s fist pumped faster and faster until he thrust his hips up and pawed convulsively at the blanket. He screwed up his face and held his breath to stifle any sound. With a last shred of conscious thought he tried to spare Demi’s bedclothes, and he came in hot spurts on his stomach.

His body quieted and his breathing slowed as he came down from the orgasm. He reached off the side of the couch and found a sock. He mopped up his pants and stomach and hand.

With each moment, the fantasy receded and a hollow despair bloomed in its place.

How absolutely pathetic was it to have a wank over your dead flatmate on your sister’s girlfriend’s couch?

Finally, finally, the tears came. They were tears of grief, certainly. But they came from a place of guilt and self-loathing and anger too. What right did he have to defile Sherlock’s memory by spinning fantasies that would’ve damn well horrified the man? He was playing with the remembrance of a great soul no longer around to assert his own will. And the part that really twisted his heart in his chest was that _he had become the joke_. From almost the moment he met Sherlock, people had assumed this about them. They thought that two men who lived as they did couldn’t be ‘just friends,’ or that Sherlock would’ve been incapable of spending so much time with someone who wasn’t servicing him in other ways, or that John was too diminutive or gentle to be a ‘real’ man so maybe he was another kind.

As he lay there clutching a come-covered sock, he wished with all his heart that those things had been true, and had not a single hope of them ever being so.

John curled into a tight ball and pressed his face into the back of the couch. He sobbed as quietly as he could until he couldn’t swallow and drooled on himself, until mucus flooded his nose and sinuses and he could breathe only in desperate gasps. He clawed at his throbbing, aching chest.

Much later, a restless sleep claimed his exhausted body.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Panic rose like bile in Sherlock’s throat. The current separation from John was both necessary and temporary. But if their shared space, their _home,_ was given away...

Mycroft straightened his tiny desk. The Swingline stapler had pride of place at the centre back, flanked by small framed photos of Mummy and Boots, a childhood beagle.

“Hey Myc, you here the rest of this week?” Roger leaned against the cubicle opening.

Mycroft swiveled and the desk chair creaked. “I’m afraid not. They’re sending me out on reconnaissance again.”

Roger chuckled. “You’re funny. Anything to make what we do seem more like MI-6, innit? Suit and all.” He winked. Roger was wearing khakis and a once-white polo shirt.

“I find a polished image opens certain doors.”

“You got it, Myc.” Roger laughed again and wandered back to his own cubicle.

Mycroft Holmes really did occupy a minor position in the British government, and his fellow sad-sack office workers there secretly (though of course he knew) called him Dapper Myc for his peculiarly formal demeanour and sartorial sense. He got quite a bit of private amusement from this; he was considering the purchase of a monocle.

This minor position was occasionally a useful cover for his other, less-minor position, and he made a point of being at his cubicle several times a month. The other days his online diary showed many far-flung meetings with a variety of Her Majesty’s civil servants and subjects.

His desk phone rang. He answered and the receptionist said, “Mr. Holmes? There’s someone here to see you. A lady named August.” Mycroft pursed his lips. “Says she’s a friend. _Myc, she’s gorgeous!_ ” The last bit came out in a whispered, excited rush.

“Thank you, Dawn. Please tell _August_ that I will be there directly.”

Mycroft made his way to the front of the cubicle farm. News of his visitor made the rounds in about twenty seconds, judging from the sudden collective urge to procure tea from the table next to the window that looked onto the lobby.

A tall, statuesque woman in a sapphire jacket and slim ankle-length black skirt sat primly on the threadbare guest sofa. Her legs were crossed at stiletto-booted ankles. She brushed auburn fringe aside from stylish eyeglasses as Mycroft approached.

For the benefit of his officemates he made a little bow instead of shaking hands. At the nadir of the bend he murmured, “Sherlock Augustine Holmes, I’ll thank you to be more discreet in your choice of _noms de guerre.”_ He rose, smiled for the onlookers. “And to not call on me at the office.”

Sherlock’s smile was all honey. He spoke in a breathy falsetto that didn’t carry the way his sonorous baritone did. “Of course, _Myc._ But since I’m here, shall we go for a stroll? I have a plan that should end this period of enforced cooperation. To our mutual delight, I’m sure.”

~~~

Mrs. Hudson would have no trouble letting out 221B; she’d already had nine enquiries and four viewings in three days just from the window sign. Or rather, the trouble she’d have in letting out the flat wouldn’t be in finding interested tenants.

A young computer-type emerged from Sherlock’s bedroom, followed by his mousy wife. “So it’s furnished now, but can we request it be let unfurnished? As well as repapered?”

The three of them considered the bold fleurs-de-lis in the living room. Martha nodded neutrally. _Interested tenants, easy as pie. Interesting tenants, though…_

“Brill. And what is the rent?”

Mrs. Hudson repeated the number she’d given each person who’d asked, which was three times what she’d charged Sherlock and John. She hadn’t worked out whether that was really the monthly value of displacing them or she was actually trying to fail at letting the place, but so far no one had called the bluff. The young couple sputtered politely, thanked her, and left.

 _My dear boys,_ she sighed. The landlady puttered around and straightened up a bit.

~~~

John sat in an examination room drumming his fingers on his knee. Being in hospital was a lot like being in a war zone; ideas of life and death loomed large, but percentage-wise most of the experience was waiting.

He’d gone to the general practitioner to appease Harry, and though the man had poked and prodded and ordered a barrage of tests, he didn’t find anything that explained John’s chest pain. John had been scheduled for an emergency angiogram a few days later, and Demi and Harry had insisted he stay with them “for safekeeping” until he got the results. He was abashed at quite how comforting it was to be petted and fed and fussed over, but he’d put his foot down when they tried to convince him to take their bedroom. He made it clear it was the couch or Baker Street, and they’d relented.

Earlier this morning he’d donned a hospital gown and followed a nurse to the cath lab at Hammersmith Hospital. They had laid him on a table and positioned the x-ray machine over his chest, anaesthetised and catheterised his wrist, pumped dye into his heart, and taken images. Back in his trousers and shirt now, he waited on the results. He was ambivalent on what he hoped these would be. Arterial blockage would at least explain the pain and might redirect his attention from his dire one-sided romance.

Dr. Luxor knocked and entered in the same motion. As during the procedure, she radiated efficiency and competence. She greeted John, turned on the light box, pinned up two x-ray films, and turned to him. “So. You are a doctor too. Do you know what you are looking at?”

John studied his own heart. His eyes traced the wide, smooth white courses of his left and right coronary arteries, the meandering branches, the even grey background of muscle. He felt neither disappointed nor relieved. “A healthy heart.”

She nodded. “You are doing something right. Vegetarian? No? Usually chest pain like you’re experiencing is a result of significant arterial blockage, but there’s nothing here.”

“Well then. That’s great. Thank you.” He put his hands on the arms of the chair and started to rise.

Dr. Luxor laughed aloud. “Funny. Sit. You still have unexplained angina.”

John sat. “I’m sure it’s nothing. I came because of my father and uncle, the family history, but this shows it’s not that.”

“Have you had any trauma lately? Sports injury, an accident, a fall?”

John’s mouth went dry. “No physical trauma.” _It wasn’t my fall._

“Any other symptoms? Upset stomach, trouble sleeping, headache?”

John was startled to realise his headache was entirely gone. It had been terrible even three days ago; how had he not noticed it dissipating? “I did have a headache for a while, but it’s gone now.”

“How long did this persist?”

“It started a couple weeks ago. After … after my friend died. Killed himself.”

“I see. How did you experience that event?”

“Sherlock was –” He saw the unique name register on her face. “You’ve read about it, then. I was there. I saw him step off and … the rest.”

Her eyes said _how awful_ and _I’m terribly sorry_ but these weren’t words for her exam room. “So it started then. When did the headache end?”

“A few days ago, I guess.” He thought back. He remembered noticing it wasn’t as bad when he was on the roof. Once he’d talked with Harry he’d felt the chest pain but … “Oh god. I’m an actual headcase.”

Dr. Luxor waited expectantly.

He sighed. “The headache started right after Sherlock died. It got worse as everyone turned on him. It was crushing. Then three days ago I finally realised I’d managed to fall in love with him.” The blush that coloured the edges of John’s ears wasn’t about being in love with another man; that was unexpected but all fine. It was embarrassment at his own extended ignorance. “Now the headache’s gone and I’ve developed angina. Literal heartache. My body… God, it’s not even original with this. I had a limp for months after I was wounded in Afghanistan. Shot in the _opposite shoulder._ That went away my first evening with Sherlock. So. Headcase.”

She nodded slowly. “Of course physical manifestation of emotional trauma is not my area of expertise. But all your tests have come back in the normal range. I can recommend a therapist –”

“Yeah. Got one. Suppose I’ll go back.”

~~~

“We’re agreed then.” Sherlock picked up Moriarty’s mobile from the table and poised his finger above the keypad. This second conversation with his brother seemed unlikely to end in another stiletto-booted huff, not only because the boots were no longer in attendance. “You’ll procure the coat and the payment and facilitate clean-up, should that become necessary.”

Mycroft nodded. He had supported Sherlock’s plan from the beginning, but had refused to say so while his brother’s cheekbones were hollow and his eyes were wild. In the days since their first conversation, Sherlock had clearly forced down meals, and his resolve had crystallised calm and dangerous. It was a more suitable state of mind for what would come.

Sherlock pressed the Send key. A proposal from Moriarty to Jeffrey winged off through the ether.

The brothers discussed the financial logistics. It was non-trivial for even Mycroft to lay hands on such a large amount of cash for an effort that must needs remain unknown to his employer.

Sherlock didn’t actually have any hope of bribing Jeffrey to ensure John’s safety, even at the lucrative sum of thrice what the gunman had earned on the hit contract. There was only one way to keep John safe from this killer. But Mycroft was always so reasonable and measured, and Sherlock needed his help. He’d deduced that Mycroft would consider the payment a virtuous incremental option, and had offered it as a way of securing his support for the overall plan.

Mycroft wasn’t truly concerned about the finances. He knew what that set of his brother’s jaw meant, and it was the right and only choice in the circumstance.

As Sherlock rose to leave, Mycroft made a little noise of just-remembering. “Ah, one more thing. The timing may yet work in your favour, but if the flat should be let before you return, is there anything you’d like from it? I’ll request your violin, of course, and I don’t suppose your clothing will be considered part of ‘furnished.’”

Sherlock froze mid-stand. “What are you talking about?” His voice threatened like distant thunder.

“You needn’t take that tone with me; it’s not as though I’m making these decisions. Haven’t you been monitoring your home? Since you’re gone and John seems unwilling to return, Mrs. Hudson has advertised the place for rent. It’s listed as furnished, I suppose so she doesn’t have to deal with all your odd belongings herself. I’m happy to ask her for anything to which you have a sentimental attachment.”

“How could she?”

“Oh Sherlock, you didn’t expect the dear lady to make it a shrine to your sainted memory, did you? One imagines she misses the income.”

“But John…” Panic rose like bile in Sherlock’s throat. The current separation from John was both necessary and temporary. But if their shared space, their _home,_ was given away, there was no guarantee John would consent to replicate the arrangement elsewhere. He had so often been exasperated by Sherlock’s strange habits and unconventional experiments… Might he see the loss of the flat as an opportunity, a release? Perhaps not; John was like no one else he’d ever met. But just the possibility made his every long muscle quiver with anxiety.

“John will manage.”

With difficulty, Sherlock schooled his features. “Of course.” No need to let Mycroft see how deeply his words had disturbed him. “Thank you for your assistance. I’ll await the money and the coat.” He turned on his heel and stalked off, stiff-backed.

Mycroft’s expression remained impassive but his eyes twinkled. He was fond of his young genius brother _(loved him more than life, if you must know),_ and it would be best for all involved if things worked out in every sense between the flatmates. To that end, he would be in touch with Mrs. Hudson as needed to facilitate their continued cohabitation. Sometimes, though, he just couldn’t resist stirring the pot.

~~~

As John crossed to the 200 block of Baker Street and saw the To Let sign swinging lazily on the pole, his hands grew still and steady. So much and nothing had changed since his last agonising moments here. Would his newly discovered feelings make his homecoming more painful or somehow less?

No one that knew John Watson even a little could doubt that he was brave. It was not the same as fearless.

He _would_ confront the spectre of the silent flat, crowded with possessions but empty in the only way that mattered; he needed to, and he wanted to. But there was no shame in delaying it a little. John continued past his own door and turned toward Regent’s Park.

As he crossed Clarence Bridge, he fleshed out the imagined beginnings of a relationship with Sherlock. He’d previously quashed these flights of fancy because what good did they do?

When he realised the good was that _they made him happy,_ he gave himself license to dream. It would be foolish to refuse any form of solace in this dark time.

Planning dates for Sherlock would’ve been difficult. The consulting detective had a visceral and disparaging reaction to any film John had ever recounted to him, so dinner and a movie seemed right out. So did a football match, a stroll through the zoo, and an evening of crazy golf, some of John’s greatest hits with previous girlfriends. He supposed he’d have to learn more about classical music and fine art. Though he’d probably try to slide in the crazy golf once just to see what happened.

They’d have set up a regular dinner date with Harry and Demi, though the men would have to cancel whenever Sherlock was in the throes of a case. When they went out everyone would assume Sherlock and Demi were together, a tall and a small incarnation of physical beauty drawn together by their mutual perfection. Ordinary-looking John and Harry would both be moved to overt displays of affection and possession toward their lovely lovers.

Sleeping in a bed with Sherlock ( _Sherlock’s, of course,_ John thought fondly) would have been the purest essence of home and contentment. Even if the man’s long limbs and erratic schedule meant that John hardly ever slept through the night; an army doctor was used to that.

John would’ve taken great care in introducing his boyfriend to friends and family. Sherlock’s incisive gaze, sharp tongue and general disregard for outside opinion might insulate him from any surprised or malicious homophobia, but John would’ve made himself the first line of that defence.

John would have continued to shop, and cook, and feed. But now each of these chores would not be a chore but an offering.

With eyes and fingers and lips, John would’ve learned every dark curl on Sherlock’s head. Coiffed in the morning. Knotted and windblown from a dash through the city. Dripping from the shower. Warm and sweet from the pillow.

At home of an evening, Sherlock would have spread bottles, tubes, knives and samples over every flat surface in the kitchen, leaving a buffer only around the microscope on the table. He’d be hunched over it, adjusting the slide and knobs, lost to the world beyond 400x magnification. And yet when John tried to slip by to the fridge, Sherlock’s hand would reach out, seeking his partner’s.

He knew it wasn’t how it would have gone, because who had any idea with that man. But since only imagination remained, these constructions were just as realistic as anything else. John settled on a bench near a bed of begonias to bask in the warmth of the June sun and the happiness of never-really-could-have-beens. 

~~~

The bell at 221 Baker Street brought Mrs. Hudson to the door. She opened it to find a long, lean bike courier practically vibrating with energy and hurry, one hand dancing on the seat of a fixed-gear bicycle. His eyes were shaded by a close-fitting striped cycling cap.

“Delivery for a Mrs. Hudson,” he said, drawing an envelope from his pack and pushing a tablet toward her for a signature. She took the stylus and looked at the screen:

_Mrs. Hudson,_

_Observe the messenger. Please remain calm; we may be watched._

_Sign here:_

Her brows knitted together and she looked up in confusion. _Observe? Being watched?_ The courier was wearing a yellow shirt, shorts that ended just below the knee to show off well-defined calves smudged with chain grease, and a messenger bag slung across his chest. He was in constant motion; she knew they were paid by the delivery rather than the hour. She searched his face –

– which suddenly stilled –

– and became unbelievably, unmistakably, _Sherlock Holmes_ –

– and her eyes grew wide as saucers. “ _How –_ ”

Back in loose, detective-disguising motion, he made the slightest gesture with the tablet.

 _Right, remain calm. The dear fool gives me the shock of my blessed life and I’m to keep calm._ “How… how silly of me, I’ve forgotten my glasses.” She peered at the screen in near-sighted nonchalance and scribbled her name with the stylus.

Sherlock’s already immense respect for his incomparable landlady grew by fully one hundred percent. He took the tablet, swiped, and handed it back. “And your initials here, mum.”

_John is in danger. He must not know._

_Initial here:_

She added her initials. Such scrapes her boys got into.

“About any of it, yet,” murmured the messenger as he handed her the envelope.

“Thank you. Do you know when I might expect … further correspondence?”

“Can’t say specific, mum, but hopefully soon.”

“Splendid. Thank you, dear.”

And the bike courier was off, quick and fluid as imagination.

Martha maintained her air of pleasant bemusement as she shut the door, adding a murmured “Nice young man” for full old-lady effect. She didn’t allow her hands to shake until she was locked in her flat opening the envelope. A single sheet of paper covered in a gloriously familiar scrawl was wrapped around a thin stack of large-denomination banknotes.

_Please do not let the flat. Two months’ rent enclosed. I will return soon and I hope he will too. Will explain then. Tell no one. Burn this immediately. SH_

She lit the gas hob and scrubbed away tears so she could see to avoid burning her fingers. An absolutely incredulous smile began to pull at her cheeks.

Sherlock had given her a great gift some time ago by helping her sever ties to a very bad time in Florida. The gift of _this_ moment was even sweeter for the impossibility of it, the way it reattached her to two precious hearts that had been equally lost to her. The flame licking up that paper to turn it to ash and smoke was quite possibly the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen.

~~~

As John, now fortified by pleasant daydreams, again approached his home, something seemed different about the building but he couldn’t put his finger on it.

He let himself in and paused in the entranceway to inhale the familiar scent of tea and baking tinged with a faint chemical smell from upstairs.

The door to 221B opened. Against all rational thought, John’s heart skipped a beat.

Mrs. Hudson emerged.

Had that been her shadow at the window? Wait, was the sign still up? He hadn’t noticed. Fear lanced out from his chest and through his limbs. “It’s not – you haven’t already let it, have you?”

At the sound, Mrs. Hudson looked up and froze with her hand on the doorknob. She stared down the staircase at him for an interminable moment. “John. What are you doing here?”

John started up the stairs. His right hand clutched his jacket over his heart, which he could feel warming up to a proper panic. _If I can’t go back…_ “Please, I know I said it was too painful, but I’ve changed my mind. I don’t know how I’ll cover the rent yet but I will, I’ll find a way. Please, Mrs. Hudson, tell me it’s not gone.” He reached the upper landing and resisted the urge to shake his landlady, who was still motionless and staring.

“Gone? What do you – oh!” She glanced back over her shoulder into the flat. “Erm, you saw me with sign? I was thinking of taking it down because … because there wasn’t any interest … but then I realised I was being foolish.”

John’s disbelief must’ve shown on his face, as she abruptly changed tack. “That’s not true, of course there was interest, it just wasn’t the right sort. Erm, people can be so dreadful, and what with Sherlock… Never mind about that, you said you’re coming home?” She beamed up at him with such a pure, gentle joy that he couldn’t help but smile back.

He nodded. “I miss him so much. I thought it would be easier away from all the reminders but it wasn’t. And I’ve realised … Mrs. Hudson, I’ve realised that I was … I _am_ …” She’d always been so sweet and understanding. He was four words from a full confession when she broke in. 

“Oh dear, I almost forgot, I’ve got something in the oven. So good to have you back, love.” She patted his arm, squeezed past him, and hurried down the stairs.

John’s confusion at her odd welcome was quickly forgotten as the open door of 221B drew his eye. He stepped across the threshold and looked, breathed.

He’d half-forgotten the mixture of scents that was uniquely home, the place of Sherlock-and-John. His own cooking, Sherlock’s various experiments, the pitchy rosin notes, the vinegar of the window cleaner Mrs. Hudson used. The idea that this milieu would change now without Sherlock’s contributions brought a deep regret. Perhaps if he periodically opened jars of volatile compounds, maintained the violin, and scorched something…

Everywhere his gaze fell he saw absence, but the absence was borne of Sherlock’s abiding presence. _Here is where he solved The Deconstructed Portmanteau. That spot on the carpet is from his principled refusal to use a plate for sandwiches. That’s just where he stood at the mantle to talk to the skull… where has he put her now?_ It was dismaying and comforting all at once.

John went to Sherlock’s doorway and leaned against the frame. Sherlock had only half made the bed on that last morning, and the whole place seemed as though he might return at any minute. Before John realised it, an hour had passed.

Finally he pulled himself away, set down the duffle, and opened his laptop. He had a renewed dedication to writing up all the little curiosities and big puzzles that had so far gone unremarked. It would be a tribute to his friend, a legitimate way to spend hours recalling details of his life, and a sustained rebuke to those who had found it so easy to vilify and dismiss him. _I’ll consider myself married to the work,_ he thought with satisfying symmetry.

Afternoon faded into evening unnoticed, and finally John looked up to realise the only illumination was coming from the screen in front of him and the streetlights outside. He wandered to the kitchen and ate some stale biscuits, then got ready for bed and went upstairs to his room.

He stared at the ceiling for an hour. It was too familiar; it felt like Sherlock should be just downstairs. Finally he went down again and lay on the couch.

Another sleepless twenty minutes passed. _I’ll just go look,_ he told himself. He went to stand in Sherlock’s doorway again.

_His dressing gown will be just behind the door…_

John took it from the peg, went to sit on a corner of Sherlock’s bed, and laid it across his lap.

 _God, John, who are you kidding. There’s no one here to judge._ He lifted it, buried his face in it, and scooted back into the bed. _So glad you’re not here to see this, Sherlock. If only you were._

When his thoughts wandered and he started touching himself, he got up and went to the loo. It didn’t seem right to do in the man’s own bed even though, or perhaps because, the scent lingering on the sheets and pillow was so deliciously heady.

~~~

Sherlock arrived on foot at the derelict little warehouse in Silvertown two hours before the appointed time to re-examine the place and be ready for Jeffrey’s arrival. The building had the simultaneous advantages of reeking terribly of dead fish, causing the homeless and the hooligans to seek other space, and being stripped bare of anything interesting or valuable, which meant it didn’t attract security patrols or thrill-seeking urban explorers. In short, it could be relied on to be entirely deserted.

He wore a black cashmere thigh-length coat with a black leather collar that was the very double of Moriarty’s; Mycroft said that the bloodstains on the original had been hopeless. He’d added a dark hoody beneath it to hide his hair and face. He patted his various pockets with hands gloved in black leather. The thick wad of cash and everything else was still in place.

Sherlock entered at the back of the building, opposite the door he’d instructed Jeffrey to use.

Before he could take a second step into the gloom, there was a rustle of movement behind him and he felt cold steel at the base of his skull. Sherlock stopped moving and closed his eyes so his vision would adjust more quickly to the darkness.

The voice from behind him was much deeper than Moriarty’s, but the lackadaisical tone of barely contained violence was chillingly familiar. “Jim! What’ve you been up to? You’ve gotten so _tall._ Though you’re _changeable_ as ever, first asking me to kill John Watson and then to protect him… Odd even for you, don’t you think?”

Sherlock waited silently.

Keeping the gun pressed against Sherlock’s skull, Jeffrey patted him down with his left hand. He drew a long fierce knife from Sherlock’s pocket. “Oh ho! What’s this? Going on a hunting trip?” He flung it away. The clang of metal on concrete echoed in the cavernous space.

Sherlock balled his hands into fists but kept still.

Jeffrey reached into the other side pocket, pulled out the money, and laughed. “Oh now, didn’t your mother tell you it’s not safe to carry so much cash? Mmm, especially to a deal that’s not final.” The money disappeared from Sherlock’s sight as Jeffrey pocketed it.

Sherlock stayed still and bowed his head, every nerve focused on the voice and body behind him.

Jeffrey ran his hand down one leg and up the other, ending with a firm grope of Sherlock’s genitals. Finding nothing more there, he reached around to Sherlock’s front. He caressed his chest like a lover and rubbed himself up against Sherlock’s backside. Still Sherlock controlled his breathing and kept his head down. 

Jeffrey’s hand stopped over the folded photograph inside the coat’s breast pocket. He drew it out between a finger and thumb. “What’s this, hmm? Picture of a sweetheart?” He brought it around to look.

Sherlock heard the crinkle of unfolding, then a sharp intake of breath. The picture was a closeup of Moriarty on the rooftop, eyes staring, head haloed wetly with blood and brain.

“Who are you? Show me your face!” Jeffrey grabbed Sherlock by a shoulder and spun him violently.

Quick as a cat, Sherlock charged into the turn and swept sharply up and out with his left arm. He slammed the gunman backward into the wall, gun arm extended, and grabbed a fistful of collar with his right hand. He squeezed and twisted Jeffrey’s right wrist until he dropped the handgun.

The motion had knocked the hood back. Breathing hard, Sherlock stared steadily into the eyes of the man hired to destroy the measure of happiness he had finally found.

Shock flashed across Jeffrey’s face, quickly chased off by appreciative merriment. “Well, look who we have here! What a surprise!” He giggled, and his eyes sparkled as he bared his teeth in a feral grin. He flicked his eyes to the photo on the ground. “Did you do that? Nasty mess of a good man. Rather clumsy of you to try to impersonate him; he’s one of a kind. You really thought you could bribe me to spare Dr. Watson? I ‘spose both of you have to go now. Only fair to poor Jim.”

Sherlock nodded. “Yes. I thought you’d say that.” His right fist inched toward Jeffrey’s windpipe.

To Jeffrey’s credit, he was skillful with more than just his sniper rifle. He twisted left and kneed Sherlock’s side. They grappled and Jeffrey pulled Sherlock to the floor on top of him. In guard, Sherlock’s knees ground into the pitted concrete as Jeffrey twined his legs around Sherlock’s back. The gun was a yard away.

They grabbed at hair and faces and threw what blows they could at close quarters. Jeffrey got an arm over the back of Sherlock’s neck and pulled his head down onto his chest. Sherlock punched at his gut as his air started to go.

Jeffrey used his advantage to free his left arm and grope for the gun. He got it in his hand. But it was a mistake; Sherlock was longer, more experienced, and fueled by righteous terror for John.

Sherlock wrenched his neck free, shoved his left arm under Jeffrey’s upper arm and up over his wrist, and pressed down on the same wrist with his right. In this shoulder lock, Jeffrey lost his leverage to aim the gun. He flailed at Sherlock with his right arm, wailed on his head, yanked at his hair. All the while, Sherlock bent Jeffrey’s left arm, inch by quivering inch, until Jeffrey pointed the gun at his own temple. The assassin’s grimace was pained and wild.

Sherlock forced a gloved finger onto the trigger. He squeezed. 

John had killed a man once to protect Sherlock. The silenced retort sounded just like _thank you_ to the only ears left to hear it.

Sherlock rolled off and to his feet. He looked around, found Jeffrey’s long rifle bag, and kicked it nearer the mess of his head. He retrieved the wad of bills and the long knife he’d brought as an invitation to violence and made sure his face was clean of blood spatter before he slipped back out into the evening. He left the gun in Jeffrey’s hand and the photograph of Moriarty on the floor.

~~~

Mycroft’s phone chimed a new text.

_Done. SH_

He nodded to himself and set about notifying those responsible for loose ends.

~~~

Two mornings later, John was making toast and tea when his phone belled a new text. It was from Molly Hooper _(how unexpected):_

_Something to show you. Come to my office at 6pm?_

John keyed backed an affirmation, but when he pressed for details, all he got was:

_It’s a surprise! :) :) ;)_

Well, at least it sounded nice, then.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Today was the day Sherlock came back to life!

Molly Hooper worked through a stack of pink- and purple-stained slides with barely contained excitement. She waltz-stepped between microscope, computer, and refrigerator, humming. _HMM-hmm-hmm, HMM-hmm-hmm, hmm m m hmmmm…_

The biopsies themselves were routine. Yes melanoma, no melanoma, yes myocardial infarction, no. She adjusted knobs and dials, made notes, worked through the backlog. It was barely past dawn on a Wednesday morning and she had the lab, and most of this floor of Bart’s, to herself. She’d come in early to distract herself; she’d hardly been able to sleep the previous night in anticipation. Today was the day Sherlock came back to life!

For three weeks Molly had kept two secrets: _Sherlock did not die. Moriarty did._

The corollaries of these secrets – that Sherlock was every bit the genius he’d seemed, that Moriarty wasn’t an actor, that Sherlock’s closest friends had been in mortal peril – all of these Molly had told no one. No one except Toby Hooper, who based on his continual defiance of her commands (“Off the table!” “Don’t chew the aloe!” “Oh _please_ don’t sick up there!”) probably didn’t speak English anyway. Even so she’d whispered the words into his silky ears. He’d purred conspiratorially.

She’d kept to herself more than usual at work, but no one noticed the uptick from _mostly_ to _almost-always_. Her habits of appearing flustered, apologetic, and agreeable – of _not being seen_ – had served her well when people gossiped about the events around the water cooler. _You’re right, I did know Sherlock Holmes, but I guess I didn’t really! No, haven’t really been reading the papers, sorry. Yes, I went out with Jim from IT a few times, silly me, huh! Sorry, it’s all kind of upsetting, I’m just going to … Sorry, do you mind? Sorry._

Evenings during the early part of Sherlock’s absence, in an effort at prevention by precognition, she’d imagined all the ways she might come a cropper on this intrigue business.

 _I could talk about Sherlock in the present tense to someone:_ That was forgivable, people did it all the time about the dead ones. She’d just need to avoid phrasings like “today he said.”

 _An investigative journalist asks me about signing Sherlock’s death certificate and I giggle uncontrollably:_ Blame it on nerves and segue to weeping.

 _A morgue tech finds the vest and asks me about it:_ This one she just had to stop perseverating on. The vest was no longer at Bart’s. Mycroft had taken it. She’d go look in the locker in the morgue one more time to make sure. And if someone asked her why she kept looking in that locker, she’d say she’d misplaced a cardie.

 _John’s terrible grief overcomes all my resolve and makes me fess up:_ … That one was a definite possibility. She’d just need to avoid him.

A week on, her evenings had changed. She’d been exchanging witty repartee on Match.com with a new prospect, Augie, for a few days, and they’d gotten on so famously they’d agreed to get dinner. He said he’d be wearing a hat. She dressed carefully and nervously and met him at a little Japanese place in Camden. A tall bloke in a dark suit, white shirt, and rakishly cocked bowler was waiting outside when she arrived. She thought, _Oooh, Augie looks like a young John Cleese._ She covered her giggle with her hand and pretended it was a yawn, though that wasn’t really any better on a first date.

They’d gone inside and been seated in a private tatami room. After the waitress took their drink orders and slid the shoji door shut, Augie said “Please don’t scream” and removed his hat. And just like that, Molly was on a date with Sherlock Holmes.

It wasn’t the way she’d so often imagined. He ate hungrily, for one thing. He was in fact interested in knowing how she was doing, and he didn’t much want to talk about himself. Really the only thing that conformed to her fantasies was that he looked well fit eating sashimi with chopsticks. 

Mostly he’d steered the conversation repeatedly back to his flatmate. How was John taking it? Describe how he acted and what he said to her at the funeral. _(‘Sad?’ Please, Molly, be precise!)_ Could she find out why he wasn’t sleeping at the flat? Had he been reading the articles in the tabloids? She didn’t think he’d really start to believe that Sherlock was a fraud, did she?

This had ultimately and quite suddenly cured Molly of her crush on the detective. It was fitting; just as he had only recently really seen her, she just now saw him. Behind his brilliant, icy exterior, Sherlock Holmes was caring (if selectively), endearingly insecure, possibly gay, and clearly gone on someone else. She resented this for the time it took to mix new wasabi into the shoyu. Then her breathless infatuation completed its transmutation into fond friendship, begun when she observed the despondent pain at leaving a loved one that was so like her own father’s. Living among the dead made a person mostly pragmatic.

And so, for the last two weeks of Sherlock’s absence, Molly had kept a third secret that she believed was known only to her in all the world: _Sherlock Holmes is in love with John Watson._ The genius detective himself seemed not to realise it, and she hadn’t quite known how to bring it up.

Molly was already equally fond of John, who was genuinely kind and had always tried to smooth over Sherlock’s more thoughtless barbs. Today she would get to witness their reunion. She had towering hopes that the emotional moment would trigger twin revelations ending in a passionate kiss. _Pair of British blokes, though. Might not happen like that._

In her lab at Bart’s, Molly pulled the next box of slides from the fridge. She beamed to herself, breathed deep, and launched into an especially enthusiastic hum of the snippet she’d been repeating for the last half hour:

_Matchmaker, matchmaker, make me a match, find me a find –_

 “Dr. Hooper.”

“Eeep!” Molly shrieked at the sudden voice and joggled the box of slides. She whirled to face Mycroft. How did the man walk so silently on these floors with those shoes?

“Pardon me, I didn’t mean to startle you. I just wanted to let you know that the death certificate has been taken care of.”

“Death certificate? You mean” (she dropped her voice to a whisper) “ _Sherlock’s?”_

Mycroft’s lips made the briefest moue at her lack of subtlety. “Yes, that’s the one.”

“Sorry, what do you mean? I signed it, I thought it _was_ taken care of.”

Mycroft sucked his cheeks. “Yes, now that he won’t be quite so dead, it’ll be better for your career if there’s no record of that.”

Molly blushed. She really was rubbish at this cloak-and-daggering. “Oh. Erm, thanks.”

Mycroft turned to leave, then turned back. “Be gentle to John this afternoon; it will be a shock. Was that ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ just now?”

“Sorry, what?” Molly blushed harder. “Oh, was I humming? I do that sometimes. When I’m alone. Showtunes mostly. Sorry.” She turned away and searched desperately for a different melody. She launched into “The Phantom of the Opera” as if to say _any tune at all will do, no particular meaning to any of them._

“Indeed. A pleasant way to keep oneself company.”

Molly nodded and smiled awkwardly.

Mycroft hummed a few tuneless bars that had the same rhythm as her earlier refrain. “It will be a difficult task.” He smiled.

Molly stared. Was he saying … Did he know about Sherlock’s feelings? Her hopes for Sherlock and John?

Mycroft headed for the door. “They may require nudging.”

It quite sounded like… But she’d never been any good at reading people, _living_ people, maybe he meant…

He winked as he slipped out. “My dear Moll-yenta _._ ”

She watched the door swing closed, then broke into a radiant grin. Of course such a momentous development couldn’t have gone unnoticed by _two_ Holmeses. Her mental orchestra swelled as she waltzed to the microscope.

~~~

Martha Hudson pulled the next tin of fairy cakes from the oven. Sherlock might be returning any day now, and her joy at the imminent homecoming and reunion was manifesting in a prolific array of baked goods. She’d been round the corner to the Tesco Express twice already today, once when she ran out of eggs and again when she used up the flour.

She couldn’t stop thinking of the confession John had tried to make to her. _Mrs. Hudson, I’ve realised that I was … I am …_ John had been about to say he was in love with Sherlock, she just knew it, and she’d fled to hide her glee. She’d avoided him as much as possible since then because she didn’t know how long she could stand his lovelorn stoicism before she’d crack and say the words that would assuage his grief but undermine the bigger picture.

 _Ah, what a day that was,_ she thought as she whipped the icing. Sherlock alive, John home, learning that there was yet hope for an upstairs romance.

But John was experienced at being in love, while Sherlock seemed a babe in the woods. So that had probably been the easy part.

Or was it? Which was the bigger marvel: _Sherlock Holmes loving,_ or _loving Sherlock Holmes?_

The universe had been lavish with miracles lately. _Perhaps we’ll get one more,_ she mused as she started the chocolate biscuit cake.

~~~

Greg Lestrade had heard from Mycroft, who’d heard from Molly, who was arranging the big reveal with Sherlock, that John would be reintroduced to Sherlock this afternoon.

Greg’s relief was immense and physical. He’d called John fifteen times since that miserable phone call at his desk and texted him thirty-two, and every contact had gone unanswered. After four attempts his calls stopped ringing through and started going straight to voicemail. Greg had walked around with a knot in his gut for the entire last week.

The stomach ache was finally easing as he stood here in the greetings card aisle looking for the right words to apologise. He’d started with a Welcome Back card for Sherlock; he had visions of adding a cheeky “from the dead” to the glossy front. But then he’d owe John a card too, and none quite seemed to capture the sentiment of “sorry for being an arse and congrats that your friend-and-I-can’t-tell-if-there’s-more didn’t really peg out.”

 _Oh, sweet Jesus in a jalopy._ Greg tossed the Welcome Home card down and walked out of the shop. _I’ll just get them Scotch._

~~~

Packing up took not quite ten minutes. Sherlock was taking the new laptop and Moriarty’s mobile, the black boots and auburn wig to retain for a future disguise, and the Sambas, which made him feel pleasantly sporty. The rest he was leaving for Mycroft to deal with. He flipped his satchel closed and exited the flat without a backward glance.

He didn’t even have to knock next door; Kashka was waiting in her doorway. He returned the post box key to his elderly Russian neighbour. “You’ll have to get your own mail again. I’m going back home.”

He’d been bringing her post up to her flat for nearly his entire residence here. It started when he returned from a John-watching expedition just after she checked for letters. The stairway in this old building was wide enough for one babushka and no wider, and Sherlock had died of frustration twice before he reached the second-floor landing behind her. There was ample time to recall the night last December when John had laughed himself helpless in front of the telly.

 _“What could_ possibly _be so hilarious?” Sherlock intoned darkly in the kitchen. John thought the question was meant for him and tried to answer even though he was giggling so hard he couldn’t manage verbs. “Mr. Bean … ha ha … old lady … ha ha ha … stairs … he he he … OLD MAN!” The explanation was indecipherable and Sherlock didn’t pursue it._

When Sherlock reached the blessed freedom of the hallway one step behind Kashka, he had growled, “Madam, in the interest of efficiency, in future perhaps I should check your post box for you.”

Her laugh was sudden and loud. “Ha! Too slow for you, young man? I take your help!” She’d given him a big gap-toothed grin and handed over her key.

They’d exchanged a few words along with the post, and last night she’d invited him for dinner. He’d accepted; it was a fine way to wait out Mycroft’s i-dotting and t-crossing. When he entered her flat, his delicate nostrils flared. Here, conclusively, was the source of the frying, pickled food, and cat that sometimes wafted through his living room.

Kashka fed him stew and wholemeal bread and talked in halting English of her family. Sherlock berated himself for letting his Russian go dormant, but he made a few attempts and she was delighted. Her little grey cat jumped into his lap midway through dinner, fell asleep, and drooled on his leg. It was nothing like Baker Street and yet strangely agreeable.

Now she nodded at his satchel as she pocketed the key. “Ah.” She grinned suddenly. “You forgot?” She gestured at him, mimed putting something on her head, then cupped one hand near her forehead and the other at the back of her neck.

“I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”

“Ach, ach.” She waved her hand in front of her, dismissing the question.

“Goodbye, Kashka.”

“Goodbye, Matthew. Wait, wait.” She turned and hobbled toward her kitchen, leaving Sherlock at the door. When she returned, she held out her wrinkled hands to give him a roll wrapped in a napkin and a half-full container of table salt.

“You know it? I wish good for you.”

Bread and salt: He did know it. It was a Jewish custom, oft reinterpreted, the gist of which was prosperity and permanence for a new home. He had no particular opinion on the religious significance, but the spontaneous and sincere personal nature of the gesture was … touching.

He didn’t even have to think of John to say, “ _Bol'shoye spasibo._ Thank you very much.”

Sherlock was a block away when he stopped and turned back to study the building. That pantomime she’d made – he was suddenly certain it had been a deerstalker.

~~~

The more John thought about it, the more puzzled he was by Molly’s invitation. They were friends, sort of, but Sherlock had been their main connection, and in these three weeks they hadn’t met up once to mourn or reminisce. What, in this diminished post-Sherlock world, could she now want to _show_ (not _give_ , not _tell_ ) him that was a surprise meriting two smileys and a winky-face?

They had the medical profession writ large in common, but her text had seemed awfully chipper if she wanted to show him a particularly interesting corpse, he thought as he left his flat. Well, no, it was Molly, but then why the mystery?

Waiting for the tube, it occurred to him that maybe she’d discovered something about Moriarty. But he didn’t think Molly was made of stern enough stuff to do anything but go straight to the Met if that was the case. To Lestrade, _the fickle fuck._

Swaying with the motion of the train, he wondered whether she’d somehow gotten Sherlock’s phone. Didn’t seem all that likely.

Walking back to street level, he riffed on the idea that she’d done some kind of tribute to Sherlock. Did she draw? Perhaps she’d knit something. A blue scarf, maybe, or a condolence jumper. Eh, he wouldn’t put it past her, but she was probably too shy to share anything of the sort with him.

Entering St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, John realised she could just be worried about him and trying to get him out of the house. If that was it, maybe she’d also have that ham she’d offered at the funeral. That’d be nice, he was a mite peckish.

So it was that he entered the lab containing her office at 6:19 pm on Wednesday.

Molly was standing at a bench midway down the room watching the door. “John! Finally!”

“Yeah, sorry I’m a bit late. So I’ve been promised a surprise. Is it food?” He walked past her darkened office to meet her at the lab bench. They exchanged slightly awkward cheek kisses and a half hug.

Sherlock couldn’t hear their words from behind Molly’s office door, but his eyes were frenetic in their evaluation of John’s appearance and manner. _Late for the appointed time but not hurrying, doesn’t suspect the purpose of the meeting, not overconcerned with making a friend wait, unlike him, feeling off. Longish hair, overdue for a trim, unlikely to be too busy, emotional reasons for neglecting his grooming. Even gait, no recurrence of that particular psychosis, different mental state from war trauma. Jeans deeply creased at tops of thighs and backs of knees, worn many times, disregarding own wash-in-three rule, lack of motivation to maintain appearances. Black shirt, not his best colour, rather funereal … oh._

Sherlock was anxious to return home and resume relations with John, who was helpful, amusing, kind, and tolerant. And prime subject of sexual fantasy, presently, but Sherlock imagined there would be less need for that once he was home, reunited with his violin, and not so frequently out of sorts. He had agreed with Molly and Mycroft that they should break the news to John in stages, giving him time to adjust. And so he stood in the dark waiting for Molly to deliver her oration and make the agreed-upon hand signal. He had in no way anticipated how being yards from John with the imminent promise of meeting his eyes again would try his patience. His hand snaked into his pocket for his mobile.

To John, Molly looked excited and more than a little worried. She was wearing a festive pink lipstick and smiling nervously. His birthday wasn’t for more than a month yet, but she seemed ready to spring a surprise party on him.

Molly cleared her throat. “John, I have some things to tell you, and you have to try not to be angry but to see the whole picture.” She glanced at a paper in her hand.

_She has notes for this?_

“Sometimes it’s necessary –” Molly suddenly stopped and reached into the pocket of her lab coat. She pulled out her mobile, glanced at the screen, and looked a bit peeved. She started again: “Sometimes it’s necessary to endure something unpleasant for the sake –”

This time John heard her phone vibrate. She glanced at it again and huffed. “OK, I’ll summarize. We haven’t been totally honest with you because – bollocks!” Her phone was buzzing again. She glared at it and became downright cross. “Fine! John, the short version is that three weeks ago –”

John’s left jeans pocket vibrated and a brace of churchbells pealed once.

The colour drained from his face and his stomach free-fell into his shoes. It was a sound he had never expected his mobile to make, the tone he’d melodramatically assigned to Sherlock’s texts when he’d waited in the park near Demi’s flat.

“Molly,” he croaked as he fumbled in his pocket. “Who has his phone? _Who?”_

He extracted the phone and it fell from a hand that had lost all feeling. The damn thing hit the floor and powered off. His thumb shook as he pressed the button to start it back up.

Molly opened and closed her mouth, fishlike. Her hands convulsed on the sheet of paper. Her eyes skated past him to her office.

John turned to follow her gaze.

To where Sherlock Holmes stood by the wall.

The man was wearing his dark coat and blue scarf. His face was unblemished. His chest rose and fell. His eyes blinked. He looked for all the world like it was late May and John’s life hadn’t ever burned down.

John stared and stared. He looked back to Molly, who looked nervously excited again. He turned back to Sherlock.

The very air held its breath.

John’s ragged voice was vanishingly quiet. _“Say something.”_

Sherlock’s lips moved just like a living man’s. “John. You’re safe now.” The liquid baritone was the very same that had been so little remarked when Baker Street never thought to do without it.

John took one step toward him and then doubled over to retch. Nothing came up, but it seemed a heart knitting itself back together could hurt just as much as when it shattered on the pavement. _Reparo._

Sherlock waited. Now that it was underway, his patience was restored.

Molly wanted to do something but had absolutely no idea what, so she just stood and gaped and twitched.

John straightened and saw that Sherlock was still there, still not-dead. This man who had righted his life, who had created the best chapter of everything, who had spent his dying breath on John. Gorgeous specimen of humanity wrapped around peerless intelligence and dearest heart. _The man I love. It is not over._ A wondering smile began to blossom.

The rush of sound in John’s ears could’ve been the ocean. He took a step toward Sherlock. And another. He would embrace him, he would touch his face, he would kiss him whether he cared for it or not.

John took another step.

And realised he was the tiniest bit angry.

It was a blessing beyond all measure, it was. But why had it been necessary at all?

The smile faltered.

Sherlock looked so regal, and posh, and calm. John was at sixes and sevens as he had been for weeks, from his churning thoughts to his unwashed trousers.

His steps began to quicken.

How could Sherlock just stand there and watch while John fell to pieces?

Did he not even realise how whatever ruse this was, whatever game, had destroyed John in some very real way?

How it had caused him to muse about the Sig, and sympathetic starvation, and following Sherlock off the roof?

How he had _fallen in love with a corpse?_

John’s stride turned positively military.

 

Sherlock watched and waited as John turned, and recognised, and started toward him.

The luxury of observing John openly and freely deducing his guileless face was intoxicating.

His greatest terror was soothed immediately when John put his hands on his knees and made a vomiting sound. Sherlock’s presence had affected him; he was not indifferent.

Sherlock’s anxiety melted into greater calm with each of John’s quickening steps. His blazing eyes, clenching fists, and lips pressed bloodless were a salve for all the long hours of worry that John would move on without him. _He’s furious with me,_ Sherlock deduced serenely.

As a keenly observant genius with a judo shodan and a distaste for bruises, Sherlock was rarely struck by a blow he didn’t expect. As John advanced, gathering steam, Sherlock held his hands loose by his sides. He did tense his abdomen, though. People said that was what had killed Houdini, an unanticipated punch to the appendix, and though it wasn’t true, there was no call to be reckless. He’d only just returned from the dead.

Ah, John was focused on his face. Unfortunate.

 

John _was_ going to hit Sherlock in the face, and he had a satisfying left hook all teed up, but at the last moment those eyes, those _living_ blue-or-grey eyes, made it impossible, and John switched to a double-handed shove that propelled Sherlock back into the wall.

Molly screamed. Sherlock waited. John clenched and unclenched his fists.

“Christ, Sherlock. What the absolute bloody fucking _fuck_.” He turned on his heel, wrenched the lab door open, and stormed out.

 

Molly found her voice. “Well, that wasn’t great.” She smiled in commiseration across the room to where Sherlock still stood.

Sherlock finished counting: … _eighteen, nineteen, twenty._ He started off after John. “What are you talking about? He _missed_ me!”

 

John made it halfway down the hall before his anger sputtered and he got confused.

Conveniently, there was the door to the gents.’ He went in and closed himself in a cubicle.

He sat on the stool, put his head in his hands, and wondered why on God’s green earth he didn’t have his hands on Sherlock this very moment. He wanted explanations, and reassurances, and apologies, but most of all he wanted to be next to Sherlock, _who was not dead._

The outer door squeaked and bespoke shoes appeared below the cubicle door. “John? May I come in?”

John pulled the door open and Sherlock folded himself in, closing the door behind him. There was really not enough space for two grown men here. John craned his neck back to look at Sherlock. Then he pitched forward, buried his face in Sherlock’s gut, and clung tight to his legs. Sherlock made a grunt that could have been surprise or pleasure and hesitantly rested his hands on John’s back.

The outer door squeaked again. A pair of legs entered the next cubicle, stopped, then backed away hastily. “Aw, Jesus, in a public toilet? Disgusting! Bloody impolite.” Footsteps stomped back out of the loo.

John snorted. He whispered, “Didn’t even know it was us. We really do have that vibe.” He didn’t hear Sherlock laughing, but his face was bounced gently against his abdomen.

Reluctantly John unhanded Sherlock and leaned back. “I am so angry with you.”

Sherlock steepled his fingers and said with feeling, “Thank you.”

John’s laughter exploded like champagne, loud and quick. _“Thank you?_ God, you’re a nutter. I mean that in the best way. Tell me why. Moriarty?”

Sherlock nodded.

“OK. … Erm, continue, please.”

“John. I will tell you anything you want, in any manner you prefer. Gladly. Do you want to do it in the loo?”

He smiled. “I suppose not.”

Sherlock held out his hands to help John up, a sweet gesture but somewhat impractical in the space. The flash of silver on his left hand caught John’s eye.

 “Er, you got married while you were dead?”

Sherlock glanced at the ring on his third finger. “This? No, this is just a way to help people not notice me.” He tugged it off and handed it to John. “Get that back to Mycroft, would you?”

They were back to John carrying the nappy bag, as it were. John rolled his eyes and secretly didn’t mind one bit. He had lived the alternative.

~~~

Molly watched them walk past her lab and tried her best at a Sherlockian deduction, but she couldn’t be sure of anything. They weren’t holding hands, but they didn’t look like they’d punched each other, either. Neither seemed to have cried, the unromantic prats. It was altogether far less satisfying than she’d hoped.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A horrifying discovery: It was _love._ Not _lust,_ but _love._

They debated going to Angelo’s to talk, but John didn’t want to share Sherlock with the world yet. Instead they ducked into a pub where they were unlikely to be recognised.

John drew the story out of Sherlock and revelled in watching him tell it. This was always the custard-filled centre of a case for both of them, the time when Sherlock laid out the series of simple deductions that explained the unexplainable and John marvelled at his genius. As he listened, John drank in every quirk of his full lips and flick of his graceful fingers.

“It’s like a chess game,” he breathed. “You saw so many moves ahead.”

Sherlock smiled. “He was a worthy opponent. He worked out what I would do to protect you – to protect my friends – before I did.”

“Then you made him believe killing _himself_ was the only sure way to make you follow through. You’re brilliant.”

Sherlock sipped and basked. There had been a dearth of _brilliant_ in his life lately, so he didn’t correct John about how little he’d anticipated Moriarty’s final lunacy.

“But how? My god, I saw you fall, and _die._ How did you do it?”

Sherlock glanced away. This was the dodgy part. “I wore a vest.”

John waited for the rest. It didn’t come. “A vest? Like a harness? You had a wire?”

“No, no, there couldn’t be anything obvious. Too much risk to anything like a wire or a soft landing or a fake body. He might have wanted to see me do it, and I couldn’t be sure who else he’d have watching or from where. It had to convince you and everyone, from any vantage point. I had a crash vest. For motorcycle or horseback riding. My coat covered it when I pulled the cord.”

John gaped. He was familiar with these vests from doctor friends who worked in casualty; they’d periodically denigrate the idiots who died with inflated crash vests while flouting the helmet law. “An inflatable _vest_. That was your solution. There’s no such thing as a four-storey horse. What about your legs? Your _head?”_

Sherlock scowled. “You’d have come up with something better, Doctor? The options were limited.” His eyes slid away again. “It had a neck component, you know. Hidden by my scarf.”

John was gobsmacked. The world’s greatest genius hadn’t arranged something more foolproof? “God. You just risked it.” He reached across the table and pushed Sherlock’s hair aside. There at his temple was a thin two-inch line of jagged white scar. It had been a real head wound.

Sherlock pulled his head away and frowned. “The odds were good. I have martial arts training. I know how to fall.”

“Jesus. Jesus.” John was just starting to believe Sherlock was back. Hearing this asinine risk made him feel he was about to lose him all over again. “But you had no pulse… dammit, squash ball under the arm? Of course. What if someone had seen the vest once you were on the ground?”

“I had some of the homeless network get there first to deflate it and make sure everything looked right. My people from Bart’s whisked me away before anyone could get a better look. And then Molly took care of things once I got inside.”

“What if Moriarty had counted her? If there was someone watching her? It wouldn’t have worked.”

“There wasn’t. I made him confirm there were only three.”

“You couldn’t be sure of that when you went up there.”

“I deduced it.”

“Surely you considered the possibility, though. What if there had been?”

“John! I deduced there wouldn’t be.”

_“If. There. Had. Been.”_

Sherlock huffed in frustration. “If… He had your life in his hands, John. Again.”

“You wouldn’t have pulled the cord.”

Sherlock didn’t answer. But his defiant stare said clearly _: There is no price I will not pay to protect you._

John stared back. Shining heart indeed. Loving this man was going to be terrifying.

~~~

On the cab ride back to Baker Street, John finally remembered to check his texts. He laughed aloud and Sherlock looked over, puzzled.

“‘I’m not dead, SH?’ You’re the goddamned most brilliant man on the bloody planet, and that’s what you came up with? _I’m not dead?”_

Sherlock started to pout at the teasing but couldn’t maintain it. It was so good to have John’s foul-mouthed excitement and easy laughter back at his side. His lips twitched. “Well, I’m not.”

After that John grew quiet.

“Why so long, Sherlock? Couldn’t you have let me in on it? The last three weeks have been … bad. It’s been bad.”

“You had to believe it until you were safe. I came back as soon as I could.”

“And the gunmen? What happened to them?”

“We did what was necessary to ensure everyone’s safety.”

John’s eyebrows crept up.

Sherlock rolled his eyes. “The _minimum_ necessary, John. We didn’t kill three people just because Moriarty hired them.”

John accepted the explanation without further enquiry. Good. Sherlock put a bow on it: “So everything can go back to normal now.”

John turned away and stared out the cab window. “… OK. Sure.”

Sherlock considered him. “You think it can’t.”

“We’ll talk, Sherlock. Give me some time.”

~~~

As soon as they opened the outer door at Baker Street, Mrs. Hudson poked her head out of her flat and then threw the door wide. “Sherlock! John! How wonderful! Please, come in!”

She plied them with bakery and offered tea. Sherlock stopped midway through a bite of scone and stared at the table.

Martha saw him eyeing her new centerpiece, a skull with daisies in the eye sockets. “Oh, darling, you can have that back. I took it as a keepsake, but no need anymore.”

Sherlock’s inner struggle showed on his face. “It seems the proper thing to do would be to offer her to you, but she really is special to me. Perhaps I could get you your own?”

Martha chuckled gently. “No, please, having you back is enough. Oh, this came for you boys.” She took a foil gift bag from the worktop and handed it to John. “Don’t let me keep you, I imagine you’re excited to be back home. You can tell me the rest later.” She searched John for signs of imminent romance, but he seemed grim and reserved.

~~~

Sherlock bounded up the stairs ahead of John. He did a giddy circuit of the living room and replaced the skull on the mantle before he turned to see John leaning against the doorframe watching him.

“So Mrs. Hudson knew.”

“I had to tell her. She was advertising our flat.”

“And Molly.”

“I needed her to make it believable.”

“And Greg has given me a bottle of Scotch with a note that says ‘sorry I lied to you, no hard feelings?’”

“He took care of his own sniper!”

“Mycroft?”

“Of course, he knows everything.”

“Jesus. Anyone else?”

“I think Kashka figured it – _what?”_

“ _Who_ the – nope, doesn’t matter. So God and everybody knew before me.”

“If there is a God, by defini–”

_“SHERLOCK!”_

“You’re an open book, John. You’d have given it away.” Sherlock thought but didn’t say: _And you’re the most important. Moriarty knew; he counted on that._

John looked down. “I see.” Somehow the hell of the last three weeks was his own fault. And now these unrequited feelings… the torment wasn’t going to end any time soon.

Sherlock felt out-of-sorts. Why couldn’t they just be happy at being back together? “John? I’m … sorry? What can I do?”

“Nothing, Sherlock. I’m glad you’re back. Really glad. I’m just … it’s late, I’m going to get some sleep.”

It wasn’t late.

John started up the stairs. Sherlock began to follow him and glanced into his own room as he passed it. He was suddenly very curious and a little hopeful. “John?” he called after him. “Why were you sleeping in my bed?”

John paused on the stairs. The difficulty of living with a genius so observant he sometimes passed for clairvoyant was that you gave up secrets as a bad job. “Work it out, Sherlock,” he said without looking back. “We can talk about whether I need to move out in the morning.” He continued up to his room.

 

Sherlock worked it out immediately, of course. _John slept in my bed when he came back to the flat. There were plenty of other practical places to sleep, including his own bed, so he had an impractical reason for doing so. Emotions are impractical. The emotions associated with a person’s bed are … sexual. Desire? Lust? John thinks about me the way I’ve been thinking about him! And he mentioned moving out; he thinks I don’t share those emotions. But this will be perfect!_ He wanted to bound right up the stairs to tell John what he’d deduced.

But then he thought, _I haven’t brushed my teeth since this morning. What if he wants to start right away?_ Instead he headed to the loo to freshen up.

 

John lay on top of his quilt fully clothed, staring at the ceiling. This was worse than his first night back at the flat, infinitely so. Then he’d only imagined Sherlock downstairs. Now he heard him opening drawers, padding about, running the shower.

He was so near now and yet so impossibly far. John’s newly discovered feelings were going to be a divide they wouldn’t be able to bridge. Their easy camaraderie and friendship would lose its lustre, strained by John feeling it was second prize even though he’d try not to and Sherlock resenting him for it. The first time he saw that Sherlock understood how he felt and didn’t welcome it was going to be both entirely expected and totally devastating.

Finally the noises downstairs died away. Sherlock must’ve gone to bed. After another ten minutes of counting the cracks in the plaster, he decided to go lie on the couch to be nearer to Sherlock. He felt grim and ridiculous about it. He couldn’t even stand being one floor away from the man. Why was he so anxious to have his heart broken again as soon as possible? He got up and went downstairs anyway.

Sherlock was standing in the corner of the living room looking out the window. He turned when John entered the room.

John’s mouth went dry and he felt dizzy.

The filtered yellow light from the street caressed Sherlock’s dark curls and cast his magnificent cheekbones in sharp relief. He was wearing that snug purple shirt, with the top four _(four!)_ buttons open to reveal a broad expanse of milky white neck and sternum. His close-fitting black trousers highlighted yards of leg and ended in bare feet adorned with those mesmerising fingerlike toes. John’s tongue breached his lips. He wanted to suck _everything._

Sherlock’s colour-shifting eyes looked straight into John’s soul.

“John.” His voice. His voice. John couldn’t breathe. He took a step forward. The beauty of the man, the naked sex appeal, was making John tremble with desire.

“John. I want you to kiss me. Will you?”

 _Not asexual, then. And at least not entirely heterosexual. How – nope. Nnnope._ The questions would keep. This unknown incarnation of his flatmate might not.

John crossed the room in a straight line and didn’t feel a single thing he crashed into on the way through. When he was toe to toe with Sherlock, both hands buried in his soft fragrant hair, their mouths a foot apart, he forced himself to pause. “Sherlock, really? Because I will.”

Sherlock held his gaze and nodded. _“Please, John.”_

The subsonic plea from that imperious mouth shattered John’s last shard of self-restraint. He shoved his face forward and pulled Sherlock’s down to meet it. Sherlock’s mouth was open too, and John pushed his tongue in eagerly. Their lips ground against each other. Sherlock tasted like mint. John moaned and felt his hands shaking against Sherlock’s head. It was so much better, so much more intense than he’d fantasised.

Sherlock’s hands roamed up and down John’s muscular back over the black shirt and gripped his hips to pull him closer.

John broke the kiss. He could’ve continued for hours but he felt frantic to do everything at once, as though this moment might pass and never come again. “Sherlock.” He nipped at his clean-shaven jaw, buried his face in his neck, ran the flat of his tongue up the long length of it, swirled it around the Adam’s apple. “I want to do more than kiss you.”

In response, Sherlock threw his head back, thrust his hips forward, and _purred._

John took it as assent and dipped his head into the opening of the shirt while his hands fumbled at the buttons. His fingers had never felt so clumsy. With his face against Sherlock’s breastbone and his hands on the shirt, he steered the consenting detective around to the front of the couch and gently pushed him down onto it.

Here John paused to take in the view. Sherlock’s limbs sprawled loosely everywhere, his hair was tousled, and his eyes were unfocused. His breathing was a shallow pant. He was breathtakingly lovely and absolutely begging to be ravished.

Then his hands reached out to John and the spell was broken. Or recast. John crouched between his legs and leaned forward to kiss him again hard on the mouth, digging fingers into his shoulders. He trailed kisses down his neck and upper chest and finally managed to undo a few more buttons. He pushed the fabric left to expose a nipple, laved it, and felt it harden. His cock twitched in concert. Sherlock smelled of lavender and musk and _male._ John slid the shirt to the other side to lavish attention on the other nipple. Sherlock’s chest was hairless and smooth, both like and very unlike the other chests John had licked and touched in his life.

Lower and lower John kissed and tongued as he undid each button. Sherlock’s panting made him feel uninhibited and powerful, and he wanted with every fibre of his being to make Sherlock shake and cry out. The need was desperate and raw, and there was something a bit not nice about it, a feeling of _you’ve undone me, I will undo you if I can._

Finally John tugged the shirt out of Sherlock’s trousers and undid the last bloody button. The belt and trouser fastenings were easier; Sherlock was so slender, and his stomach was tense in anticipation. John couldn’t even be arsed to pull trousers or pants down. He reached in to pull out Sherlock’s already erect cock and shoved just enough fabric out of the way. _Jesus, what a sight._

Sherlock moaned wordlessly and his hands mauled the sofa cushions.

John’s voice was ragged with want. “Sherlock.” He rested his forehead on Sherlock’s thigh and tried to summon a responsible doctor-adult from the depths of his fuck-it-all desire.

From above, Sherlock’s voice was deep and urgent. “Tested. Clean. Don’t need one if you don’t. Unnhh.” His hips pumped a little with each pronouncement.

 _God bless his deductions._ John smiled weakly and steadied himself for a much-desired new experience. Everything had happened so fast; he hadn’t done any research, so he just tried what he knew he liked. He circled the fingers of his right hand around the base of Sherlock’s cock. The moaning got a little louder. With his left hand he massaged Sherlock’s testicles loosely, rolled them side to side. There was a hitch in the sound from above.

John made his tongue flat and pliant and ghosted it over the very tip of Sherlock’s cock. The whole organ gave a gratifying throb in return, and Sherlock’s rumbling moan grew deeper. John moved his left hand from balls to foreskin and gently pushed this the rest of the way back. He moaned himself as a pearly drop beaded on the smooth red head. He knelt and bowed his head to lick it up.

 _Soft lips, John, no teeth,_ he coached himself as he took the head in his mouth. He worked his tongue over and around, then began to move up and down from the neck, engulfing more and more of the length with each downward motion. He brought his left hand up to grip the flesh of Sherlock’s hip.

Sherlock’s moans and grunts were reaching neighbour-waking volumes. John grinned around his full mouth, though he had a passing wish that Mrs. Hudson wouldn’t hear.

Then John began to suck and move in earnest. With the first really good thrust he gagged himself, and had to back off a little to maintain the rhythm. It was immensely arousing and rather less neat than he’d imagined. He felt drool or precome trickling down his cheek, and his eyes watered each time Sherlock pushed his hips forward.

Finally John tested his swallow reflex. It drew Sherlock in farther, and John tolerated it this time. He tolerated it even better as Sherlock beat against the couch with his violinist’s hands and started to quiver from his waist all the way to the floor. He stopped making any sound at all until he gasped _“Oh, oh, ohhh, John, John, Jooohnn”_ and erupted violently into John’s mouth. John made a valiant effort to swallow it all but a good deal ran down his chin.

It was salty, tangy and dark. John’s heart flipped at the thought of making a thorough study of it. He gave Sherlock’s softening cock a last gentle suck, then kissed each of his still-shuddering thighs. He pulled himself up onto the couch next to his spent lover and nuzzled his cheek.

 

As Sherlock came back to the world, he found John’s face near his murmuring the words of praise that usually accompanied his deductions – _brilliant, amazing, extraordinary_ – peppered with new words that were more properly endearments – _lovely, gorgeous, perfect._ With one hand he was tracing the lines of Sherlock’s face, and with the other he was guiding Sherlock’s palm to the trousers over his very noticeable erection. Sherlock turned his head toward the sound and saw John’s face, beaming radiantly.

Even Sherlock Holmes, foremost social berk of this part of London, could recognise that mix of admiration, joy, passion, and, as they held the gaze, creeping uncertainty. It was _love._ Not _lust,_ but _love._

Terror seized his loose limbs. _Wrong, wrong, wrong!_ he berated himself. _What have I done? John is my dearest friend and the best person I know, and I let him think… I made him…_ The cocktail of dopamine and adrenaline curdled in his veins.

Time folded in on itself as each realised that something had just been broken. The desperate tragedy was that it was still only a whisper of a breath, _one single heartbeat_ , since things were whole and good. Each mind grasped for a way to go back just a little to make things different, even as the horror and regret flooded in. _If only, if only. Please, Sherlock. I’m sorry, John._ But time only flows downhill, and what has been done cannot be undone.

Sherlock turned his face away. He pulled his hand from John’s crotch and out of his grip, twisted his body free of John’s touch.

John froze. _No. Please. Please, no._ He couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t do anything but watch as Sherlock sidled away along the sofa. As Sherlock rose to his feet his shirt gaped down the middle, exposing a pale strip of smooth white chest. The shirttails fell to cover the opening in his unzipped trousers. The man was heart-stoppingly elegant even as he wrought destruction.

Sherlock Holmes was a man of many cutting words. So was it a particular kind of genius that kept him silent in this moment? The effect was more devastating than anything he could have said.

The click of the latch on his bedroom door had all the weight of finality.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _If I’d really appreciated that he didn’t love me, might never, but that he’d be my friend and fuck me too…_

After dispatching the Scotch to Baker Street, Greg Lestrade spent the rest of his afternoon on paperwork. Which is to say he spent the afternoon staring at the computer and wondering if it was late enough yet that he could ask Molly how things had gone. Maybe John would text him a wee update once they were back on speaking terms.

By 9:20, Greg had been to the gym, showered, and reheated, eaten, and washed up after dinner. Nobody had told him anything. He dialed Molly.

“Hey, it’s Greg. Lestrade. How did it go?”

There was a loud exhalation on the other end of the line. “Hi Greg. It was anticlimactic.”

~~~

John stared at the space that was now empty of Sherlock for several long quiet minutes.

It was almost peaceful, this silent void. He took a moment to consider the richly patterned carpet, the way the ambient light hit the four tea mugs he’d abandoned around the room, the jaunty angle of the table against the wall and the answering throb in his left thigh. He recognised this yawning expanse from his directionless day of waiting in hospital.

Oh, but this time was different, and the void couldn’t contain him.

Sherlock was not dead, but closed behind that door a dozen steps away.

He was not the tragedy’s victim today, but its author.

Anger recovered itself first. The humiliating ridiculousness of the erection that he _still had_ fueled his desire to kick open Sherlock’s door and finally follow through on that left hook to the jaw. It would be equally welcome for Sherlock to strike him back. A brawl would be just the thing for it.

He was off the couch and four steps gone when the rhetorical question he was screaming in his head – _What the fuck, Sherlock?_ – really registered.

Really. What the actual fuck?

What had just happened?

He worked it backwards. _Sherlock left._ Because? _I gave him a blowjob._ That started when: _He invited me to kiss him._ And first: _I told him to work out why I slept in his bed._

And forwards: _Sherlock deduced something of my feelings. Not that I’m in love with him; I think that was what shocked him at the end. That I wanted him? So he asked me to kiss him. Did he want to at all, or was that some kind of apology?_

That turned John’s stomach, the idea that Sherlock had offered up his body as a way to appease him. But rationally it probably wasn’t the case; Sherlock really had seemed to enjoy himself. That was the eye of this storm, if only John could stay there. He picked up a mug from the floor by his chair and rolled it between his palms.

More likely he’d wanted the kiss but hadn’t anticipated the rest. Even geniuses must have lizard brains that can lumber out to lie on top of higher thought and soak up all the heat and better judgment. If things were proportional, Sherlock’s would be the size of a Komodo dragon.

John stood in the middle of the sitting room, fully dressed. He hadn’t needed to fasten his trousers or button his shirt because these had never been disturbed. Sherlock had done nothing, reciprocated nothing except the beginnings of a kiss. Though Sherlock had gone along, John had done it all.

What cause was there, then, for anger? John began to squeeze the mug in his hands.

Sherlock had never lied about his emotional incapabilities or lack of sentiment. _His empathy is limited at best._ _I knew that when I fell in love with him._ Still, he wasn’t a sociopath no matter how he thought of himself. _Lacks several requisite characteristics of antisocial personality disorder from the DSM-IV,_ offered his inner Dr. Watson. And _being prepared to die for your few friends_ was certainly a counterindication.

But sex might be just sex for him. John smiled unhappily. _And I thought I was being restrained by keeping the “I love you”s to myself. I could never separate sex from feelings, but I shouldn’t be surprised that he can._ John’s wrists started to shake with the force he was applying to the cup.

_I should’ve thought it through. I should’ve done better._

One of John’s roles in this odd couple was moral compass. He could’ve asked the questions he’d shoved aside, helped them both understand their wishes and expectations. _If I’d really appreciated that he didn’t love me, might never, but that he’d be my friend and fuck me too…_

… they’d have probably ended up exactly here. Even now, the memory of the view from the front of the couch was heady and irresistible.

_Jesus, I’d do it again. I will accept whatever he offers and do what I can to make him happy. I love him just as he is. God help me._

Could ceramic flex? John stared at his hands and willed them apart. It was probably fancy to think he could crush the mug that way, but if he did it would gouge his hands. He wouldn’t be able to write or do surgery. Or caress whatever pale skin was proffered.

John had been in love before, but it had never felt so despairing. If someone described this situation to him and asked his advice, he’d tell the pathetic sod to grow a backbone and demand better. _Protect your heart. You deserve more._ But John knew in his bones that there was no more than Sherlock for him, and his heart was gone beyond recall.

The tide went the rest of the way out on his anger.

He went to the kitchen sink and splashed water over the crust of dried fluids on his face. His hands were steady now. Desire had made them tremble, but undistilled crisis had always focused this field surgeon.

The gash in his heart needed soothing and numbing, and his used mouth wanted cleansing. Alcohol was the indicated antiseptic for all manner of wounds. He opened the cupboards, but the only bottle there was the nice zinfandel Mrs. Hudson had passed on to them from her sister. Neither the right feel nor a sufficient quantity.

He returned to the living room. There was Greg’s Scotch; John considered then dismissed it. It was tainted with optimism for Sherlock’s homecoming and the kindness of friendship. To drink it now would be bitterness itself, and John sought no grand hurtful gesture, just a reprieve from this crushing despair. On balance, his life was still better than it had been six hours ago.

He went up to his room for a jacket before he left the flat. Summer nights could be cool. He straightened the table in the living room, then went out and shut the door gently. No cause to take it out on the old building or wake the neighbours.

~~~

Martha Hudson peeked into the hallway when she heard the upstairs flat door open and close.

One set of footsteps on the stairs; John’s. She watched him walk to the front door and out.

She’d overheard some encouraging rumblings from an impassioned baritone not long previous, but neither the straightness in John’s back nor his measured gait said _nipping out for Chinese to eat in bed._

She shook her head sadly. She had been right; the first part was the easy one.

~~~

Sherlock Holmes sat cross-legged in the centre of his unmade bed. He’d readjusted his pants but his trousers and shirt still gaped lewdly.

He could not think. Could Not Think.

He’d fled here in the throes of guilt and terror with John’s radiant, uncertain face seared on his retinas. John was in love with him, it was now shockingly clear, and what they’d just done together would mean something entirely different to John than it did to him. As he tried to make sense of it _(How is it possible? He’s never shown the slightest interest in men. I told him I wasn’t looking. He_ must _know I don’t do love.),_ he listened intently to the footsteps in the living room, the kitchen, up the stairs, in John’s room, down the stairs. _Please come to me. Tell me how to fix it. Please, John._ And then the footsteps exited the flat, and Sherlock’s brain went offline.

After all the years of illicit substances, sonatas, and starvation, apparently the most effective means to silence his overactive mind was to fuck up so royally that he might’ve destroyed things more completely than Moriarty ever could have. Even that pithy persistent kernel was too appalled to do anything but gawk at the carnage.

 _John._ It was the only thought left to him. _John. John. John._ He rocked rhythmically back and forth on the bed. _John._

~~~

Mycroft did have more important things to do than childmind. The little difficulty in Pyongyang was rather pressing, actually. There were four conflicting reports on why his agent there had been out of contact for fourteen hours yesterday, and her personal account was the least convincing of these.

The fact that he would be rather be quaffing Clos d’Ambonnay in a box seat at John and Sherlock’s reunion was irrelevant. Duty first.

So he wasn’t monitoring Baker Street when John left, and his attention wasn’t redirected to its inhabitants until Corinna materialised in front of his desk and murmured his name. Urgently.

~~~

John had no particular destination, and his state of mind led him towards the river. He walked until he found a pub that looked sufficiently grotty and quiet, went in, and sat at the bar. He didn’t want to chat but it would be more efficient to get service.

The barmaid gave him a friendly, “Help ya, mate?”

“Whisky. Please.”

“I’ve got Johnnie Walker Green and Black, Glenfiddich, Jameson –”

“Whatever. Jameson.”

She eyed him.

“I would like to be drunk, thanks.” He pinched the bridge of his nose and put his bank card on the bar. “Soon.”

“You got it, mate.” She poured for him.

 _To Sherlock,_ he thought, and drained it. The burn was satisfying. He had her pour again. _Always Sherlock._

Several minutes and shots later, he began to find the muzziness he sought. He thought of his sister. _I understand the allure, Harry, I do. Shame we can’t do it together now._ He swirled the little glass and watched the oily amber whirlpool it created. _That thing you said about him being a dangerous shag, wasn’t that prescient. ‘Prescient’ – not there yet, pour me another._

He didn’t notice when the barmaid switched his shot glass for a tumbler and started cutting his liquor with Coke. It occurred to him that perhaps Sherlock did love him. Cupboard love. _I bring him milk and do the washing up. I gush over him and write… I write… fuck, it’s La Chanson de Sherlock… for his adoring public. Now I can help with his physical urges too. What’s not to love? If it’s all he’s got… Yep. Yyyep, I will still take it._ It seemed more logical now, not so tragic.

He was feeling loose and liquid when he started mentally sucking Sherlock off. His soused nethers stirred weakly. _Traitorously? Ha, not if the rest of me wants it too._ From a great distance, he wondered whether anyone was watching what his tongue was doing to his glass. It wasn’t polite.

Finally the barmaid took his tumbler, encouraged him to drink a glass of water, and gently expelled him from her establishment.

~~~

Sherlock’s mobile was what finally roused him from the bed. John might want to get in touch with him. To tell him what to do or where to go. _How to apologise and where to find him. Or, more likely, to bugger myself and go to hell._ Any communication would be a welcome start. The phone was in his coat pocket in the living room. He went there and drew it out.

Nothing.

~~~

John leaned against the building and watched the night swim in front of his eyes. His vision was doubled, though with great concentration he could overlay the images. Mostly he didn’t care to expend the effort.

His jeans pocket buzzed and churchbells pealed. His limbic system had indexed the sound; he pitched forward to vomit. It wasn’t dry heaves this time, and he spat several times afterwards.

He shook his head to clear it, but that was a mistake. His vision lurched asynchronously from his physical motion and somehow made complete 360-degree revolutions. He squeezed his eyes shut until the spinning died away.

He finally got his mobile in front of his face and stared the text into focus.

_> Where are you? SH_

_Brilliant, he noticed I was gone! Maybe he’s ready for another round! Or he wants a sandwich!_ In any case, John was no longer sure where he was. He’d need a cab to get him home.

>  _> fuckk uoiu dont knoeww_

  
He tried to delete the profanity, but he’d already sent the reply.

_> You’re drunk. Who are you with?_

> _> brilllijt dedxn!!! alonne_

  


> _> goodbyw_

  
John shoved the phone back in his pocket. Like the rest of the world, he had enough of a handicap interacting with Sherlock while sober; he shouldn’t text the man when he was belligerently rat-arsed. He ignored the buzzing and tolling and started down the street.

At the junction, he stopped and looked deliberately in all directions. Very deliberately, to avoid the spins. All clear.

His phone vibrated and pealed. He pulled it out to turn off the sound.

 

The cabbie checked the junction as he signaled his left turn. There were a couple people on the pavement and one stopped at the corner absorbed in his mobile, but nobody too near the street. The driver glanced in the rearview at his fares, an inebriated young couple who were giggling and touching each other increasingly forwardly. He was both disgusted and intrigued.

 

John stepped off the kerb as the cab rounded the corner.

A screeching sound made John look right. His vision blurred. He worked out what was happening just as the car made contact with his body, so the surprise never even registered on his face.

He’d already been on the knife-edge of passing out drunk. The shock of the bumper striking his right knee and twisting it inward hit him before any pain did, but it was enough. He was unconscious before his good shoulder slammed into the bonnet of the cab.

~~~

Greg was reading the latest Lee Child thriller in bed when his mobile rang. _Really should turn that thing off at night, it’s not healthy._ But he reached for it anyway.

_Incoming call_   
_Jimmy Delahanty_

Greg’s heart beat faster. The dispatcher’s timely tips had helped keep NSY’s consulting detective from being arrested more than once.

“Lestrade.”

“Greg, it’s Jimmy. Not sure if you still want me to give you these calls now that your problem child’s dead, but they’re sending a John Watson to St. Thomas’ Hospital. Not just the same name, I checked – your John. Stepped in front of a cab.”

“My God. How is he?”

“Unconscious. Injuries didn’t appear life-threatening but you know I don’t put much stock in –”

“Sherlock wasn’t with him?”

“… Isn’t Sherlock dead?”

“Call you later.”

Greg hung up and dashed off a text to Molly while he tugged his trousers back on. He grabbed shirt and shoes and ran out of the flat.

~~~

Sherlock paced the living room like a caged panther. John was drunk and justifiably upset with him. He was at an unknown location and hadn’t responded to a text in 19 minutes. Sherlock had even disregarded his distaste for speaking on the phone and dialed John’s number, but there was no answer. The more he thought of John’s last text – _alonne, goodbyw_ – the more uneasy he became.

He was tempted to contact Mycroft or activate the homeless network, but he couldn’t be calling in favours every time his flatmate stormed out on him. Still, the unsettling urgency was growing in the pit of his stomach.

 _I need to find him._ He pulled on shoes, flung the door wide, and flew down the stairs.

When he shot out the front door, Mycroft’s car was pulling up to the kerb.

~~~

Molly was the last to arrive at St. Thomas’ Accident & Emergency waiting area. She surveyed the space and saw Mycroft and Greg in adjoining chairs, not talking. Sherlock leaned threateningly over the reception desk, and she heard deep, insistent rumbles from across the room but couldn’t make out the words.

She joined Mycroft and Greg. “Any word? How is he?”

Mycroft’s voice was dispassionate. “They have performed gastric lavage –” (he paused to make sure she understood this was the polite name for stomach pumping; Molly nodded) “– and a brain scan. Indications are positive so far. He is still unconscious.”

Molly wondered if Mycroft knew that the toe fidgeting in his shiny shoe betrayed his mental state. Bit of an obvious tell; he must be quite upset. She had a vague understanding that Mycroft orchestrated many large important things in the world, but Molly knew, and he must realise, that small important things like broken bodies and hearts didn’t respond to that sort of power. “He didn’t really mean to do it, did he?”

Greg fidgeted. Mycroft sniffed. “The driver reports that John looked him in the eye. ‘With determination.’ Such an account from someone facing criminal charges may not be reliable.”

Molly frowned. “But if he was drunk? I guess none of it seems all that good.”

Greg dragged a hand over his stubble. “Wonder why he was out there. Did he say…” He looked to Mycroft.

Mycroft shook his head. “Not a word in the car once I said John was in hospital. I felt it necessary to tell him the driver claimed it was intentional. He turned away entirely at that point.”

“Christ on a crisp. Wonder what happened.”

Suddenly Sherlock loomed over the little group. “Oh splendid, my team is back together!” His eyes and tone were cutting. “Shame on you all for not inviting Mrs. Hudson. What adventures shall we have now without John?” He stalked away without waiting for an answer.

Molly had in fact called en route to tell Mrs. Hudson the news. The landlady’s “Oh dear me”s had been worried but lacking a certain amount of surprise, and Molly had asked obliquely if something had happened. Mrs. Hudson very politely and non-specifically made Molly understand that she believed Sherlock had pushed John away. _In a … personal … way. Dear me, I hope I haven’t said too much._

Molly followed Sherlock with her eyes. He was pacing as far from his friends as possible whilst keeping sight of the reception desk.

She stood. She didn’t see Mycroft and Greg’s questioning looks; all her focus was on Sherlock. She crossed the room and planted herself at one end of his circuit. He was scowling at the ground and walked bodily into her before he noticed her. Molly squeaked and jumped back.

Sherlock disentangled himself and scowled harder. “What are you doing, Molly? Go away.”

She shoved her hands in her jeans pockets, planted her feet, and poked out her chin. It felt like a John impression. “Sorry, but you’re bodging it all up, so, no.”

The scowl slipped, coloured by incredulity. “Excuse me?”

“This is your fault, isn’t it? Oh God, sorry. I mean, what happened after you left Bart’s? No, sorry, you don’t have to say. But you can be such a plonker. Are you in love with him?”

His left eyebrow climbed to his hairline. “I do not _fall in love_ with people.”

“Not people. John. And, sorry, I shouldn’t have made it a question. You’re in love with him.”

The condescending stare stuck, but the angle of his neck changed the slightest bit.

“Think about it. Just, erm, examine the evidence.” Molly started to leave, then turned back. “It’s like having friends, Sherlock. It’ll be OK. You just have to get used to the idea.”

She smiled faintly on the way back to Greg and Mycroft. It was a treat to get the last word on Sherlock. But the smile evaporated when she thought about why they were all gathered here, now. Still no guarantee of a happy ending even though she’d never say so to Sherlock.

When Greg asked what she’d said, she spoke in generalities and fibbed a little.

Mycroft didn’t say anything, just watched. It reminded her of Toby.

~~~

 _Examine the evidence._ It was like being instructed to breathe, entirely superfluous and mostly impossible to do otherwise.

Except, maybe this once, it wasn’t.

_I appreciate John’s company. I miss him when he’s gone. It pleases me to know how he takes his tea and why he mistrusts terriers and that he thinks I am worth protecting._

_“It’s like having friends.”_

_I didn’t realise that I had friends until I hurt John by denying it. But I do. I don’t understand it but I do._

He mentally surveyed the people Moriarty had threatened and the one he’d missed. With a curl of the lip, he even added Mycroft’s supercilious visage to the picture.

_But John’s the only one I want to be close to all the time. All the time? Be precise. Most of the time. But even when I crave solitude it feels … solid … to know he’s in the next room or the next borough. That he’ll be home for dinner or on Tuesday next._

_Most of the time, then. To talk to and listen to. To kiss and lay next to. And, yes, oh yes, to give him back the pleasure he gave me tonight. A hundredfold. A thousandfold._

_Anything he’ll let me give him, I think. For as long as he’ll accept it._

Sherlock turned this over in his mind. He could _feel_ previously unintroduced synapses begin to exchange neurotransmitters.

 _If I want him to be my best friend, and also my lover_ (out of long habit, his nose wrinkled), _in perpetuity… Is that… Does that mean…_

Sherlock laid two fingers of his right hand in the hollow next to his trachea and counted.

The text from Irene Adler’s phone danced in his mind. I AM _ _ _ _ LOCKED.

His carotid pulse spelled J, O, H, N.

It was so unlikely.

_… whatever remains, however improbable…_

Yes. Elevated. Incommensurate with physical exertion.

Sentiment, then, or fear? They pointed to the same conclusion.

Sherlock allowed the possibility and initiated an uncomfortable neural reorganisation.

~~~

John slowly deduced the world from a recumbent position. _Eyes closed. No desire to open them. Dull headache. In bed but not entirely supine. Pain in right shoulder and knee. Right leg feels fat and muffled, likely bandaged. Discomfort in left hand, an IV. Am in hospital._

Hospital?

He opened his eyes. He was covered by a white sheet, in a single bed with barred sides, in an alcove behind a curtain. Definitely hospital.

Next he worked on why he was here. _Sherlock,_ was his first thought. _Sherlock is alive. At least I think so._ But if he was in hospital and didn’t know why, could he trust that magnificent improbability? He thought harder. _Yes, definitely saw him at St. Bart’s. Then we talked, and went home, and… Jesus._

The rest of the night came back in a rush. He reached up to rub his eyes and the IV pulled at the skin of his left hand. He remembered leaving home, and drinking – his head throbbed weakly in confirmation – and then texting with Sherlock, and then… this was fuzzier, but he’d checked carefully, stepped into the street… looked into a man’s eyes behind glass…

There was a wheeled rasp as the curtain slid back and a friendly-faced woman stepped in. “Oh good, glad to see you’re awake, John.” She checked his monitors and IV, offered him water, and made notes on his chart. She introduced herself as Helen and confirmed that he was here as a result of an ill-advised encounter with a cab. “You’ll have to talk to the police more about that, and we’ll need to get more imaging of your knee and shoulder when the swelling’s down. We’ll have the alcohol counselor come by in the morning. But just rest for now, love. Would you like to see your boyfriend?”

They had understood each other up to this point, but perhaps she was mistaking him for someone else? He wrinkled his forehead.

“That tall dark-haired fellow who’s giving everyone hell about taking care of you. Interesting name, Shirley maybe?”

Sherlock was here? The response was automatic by now. “He’s not my –” Suddenly tears pricked his eyes. It was true, Sherlock _wasn’t_ his boyfriend and wouldn’t be. “… not my boyfriend.” John looked away. “God.”

Nurse Helen patted his arm. “No? That’s what he said, anyway. Little bit rude about it.” She smiled mischievously. “Shireen at the desk got snappish with him, and that takes doing.” She patted him again and started out of the room. “I’ll send him back, OK?”

 _He said I was…_ John tried to understand but the painkillers make him muzzy.

The opening in the curtain filled with a pale dark vision. Sherlock paused there, eyes darting from bed to monitors to IV, then locking on John’s face. The intensity of the gaze made John’s throat close up, though having been intubated might’ve contributed.

John swallowed painfully. “You told them you were my boyfriend?”

Sherlock swept in, pulled the curtain closed, dragged a chair near the bed and sat. “Yes, how else was I supposed to get back here?”

The clipped baritone hit John like a slap. “Oh.” He looked away.

Sherlock was startled. He observed, integrated, deduced. _“Oh._ No, John, I didn’t mean… They weren’t going to let me… Did you try to kill yourself?”

_“What?”_

“The cabbie said you jumped in front of his car. And with what happened earlier…”

John squeezed his eyes shut. “Oh, bollocks. I damn well felt like drinking myself to death, but that’s harder than it sounds. I was in a pedestrian crossing and he turned into me.” He glared at Sherlock. “You daft arse, I’m not going to off myself just because you, you…” … _used me… won’t love me…_ “… did that. Jesus. And if I was I’d do a better job of it and I _god_ damn wouldn’t involve somebody else! Don’t you know the first thing about me?” John was furious even though he felt like crying. “You’re the smartest person I’ve ever met but you can be such a bloody idiot about people!”

Sherlock looked stricken. “I know.”

John’s heart clenched and his hand reached out. He willed it consciously back to the bed. _He is not getting off that easy._ He watched and waited.

Sherlock brought his hands together below his chin in that thinking pose that looked so much like prayer. The corners of his eyes squinted in concentration. “I can’t … I can’t _solve_ people the way I do evidence or bodies.”

His mouth tightened and John started to feel bad. Everyone knew this about Sherlock. They dismissed or ridiculed him for it according to the quality of their own characters. Hadn’t John thought himself above that? But Sherlock pressed on.

“Physical evidence of a crime all tells one story if you know how to see it. Even if it’s a strange or complicated one. But _feelings –”_ His voice conveyed his confusion at their imprecision. “… sentiment, motivation… They’re not logical or consistent. When I try to deduce them I see a hundred stories that don’t fit together and aren’t even all true. It’s not worthwhile.” His eyes sought John’s. In this room they were sea-green. “Before you I’d mostly stopped looking, or trying. But _you,_ John. You make me want to understand.”

John looked and looked. Sincerity and vulnerability looked especially naked on Sherlock’s fine features. His expression said _I hope_ and _I will accept your judgment._ John smiled involuntarily. _Liar. You’ll whinge and cajole until you get what you want._ The smile faded and his tongue slipped out to trace his lower lip. “So what exactly happened tonight?”

The man had the grace to blush. John was surprised he knew how. “I made an incorrect deduction.”

“Which was?”

“That I was interested in you sexually.”

“Jesus, Sherlock. What an apology.”

“I mean only sexually. When I need to focus my thinking I have a number of strategies, and while I was gone the only effective and available one was masturbation.”

_What?_

“Naturally I thought of you during those times.”

_The fuck?_

“Your presence calms me, John. And, it turns out, excites me. I hope it’s alright to say that?”

John had no words. He nodded.

“So I’d been thinking about it, and when it seemed you had as well, it seemed perfectly logical to indulge us both. And –” here his eyes went unfocused “ – it was more enjoyable than I’d imagined.”

John felt the stirrings of smugness. Sherlock had fantasised about him, _and_ he’d outperformed the fantasy? “But then why… ”

“When you came up to kiss me you looked the happiest I’ve ever seen you. Like you couldn’t believe your luck.” Sherlock dropped his face into his hands. “It made me feel like the most worthless freak. I hadn’t thought for one second about how you’d feel. When you realised I’d thought of it as, god, assisted masturbation, when you understood how much of an idiot I am… I couldn’t stand to see that on your face. I was terrified that I’d just ruined everything. Our friendship and … this, this _more_ that could make you so happy. So I left.”

John reached out his right hand to Sherlock though it made his shoulder throb. He considered the wavy top of the bowed head for a long moment before he spoke. “Have you figured out that it’s the leaving that could really ruin everything?”

Eyes downcast, Sherlock nodded.

“But you do care about me? In a different way than friends?”

Another nod, quite emphatic.

“And you want me? Sexually?” _Why am I blushing?_

Sherlock looked up to meet his eyes. Another nod. And a little bite of the lip.

This was a goddamn breakthrough.

John unleashed the giddy grin he’d been corralling since Sherlock had said, unprompted, that there was something _more_ worth not ruining. “Okay then. Those are the basics. Let’s work on the communication.” He pulled Sherlock’s hand to his lips and pressed a kiss into the palm. It was more open-mouthed than he intended because he couldn’t stop smiling.

Sherlock’s eyes fell closed as he nodded a final time. His smile was beatific. _Basking, that’s what that is,_ thought John, and he smiled even harder.

Sherlock guided their hands to his lips and kissed them where they joined. He rotated his wrist to kiss the back of John’s hand. A fractional movement let him kiss John’s thumb. His eyes fluttered partway open as he parted his lips and kissed the thumb again, a little wetly. He looked out at John from under his lashes.

John was very much looking back. His respiration was becoming erratic. It was somewhat embarrassing to be hooked up to a heart monitor just now.

Sherlock held the gaze as he untwined his fingers and brought his other hand up. He held either side of John’s hand and deliberately licked the pad of John’s thumb. John’s mouth opened and a tiny whimper escaped. Sherlock dragged his lips down the flesh to take the thumb in his mouth. He flicked his tongue once, twice, then pressed the hot wet length of it against the finger and laved the webbing at the base.

John’s groan was muffled by the metallic slide of the room’s curtain swooshing open. He tore his eyes away from Sherlock mouthing his hand.

Nurse Helen surveyed the patient with a twinkly smile and a raised eyebrow. She pointedly and professionally ignored the sizable bulge that had developed midway down his bedsheet. “Just came to see how you’re doing, John.”

“Erm, very well, thank you. Ready to go home, actually.”

Sherlock swirled his tongue approvingly. John choked.

He yanked his hand free and smiled harder at Nurse Helen. “Sherlock,” he hissed out of the corner of his mouth. “ _Timing_.” But he couldn’t help thinking that the sweet nurse was the one who really needed to work on that.

 

The rest of John’s visitors were allowed in one by one. Sherlock refused to leave, so he sat quietly in the corner and thumbed a travel magazine.

Greg was penitent and solicitous. John thanked him for the Scotch and didn’t mention that he wouldn’t be drinking any kind of whisky for a long time.

Mycroft was gracefully, comically out of his element. Who brought an umbrella-cane to A&E? But after John archly recalled Mycroft’s double-speak from their lunch date about _what happened to his brother,_ he poshed into himself and wished John good health and a speedy recovery.

Molly was, for once, the least ill-at-ease. She clucked over John and smiled at Sherlock. As she was leaving, she patted John’s hand and said, “He’ll take care of you.”

She meant it as a comfort, but it was unsettling. Convalescence at 221B: like as not it would mean Sherlock impatient with his reduced capacity for weeks on end and making his own damn tea.

Oh well, he could count on Mrs. Hudson to look in on him from time to time.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I humiliated you and almost killed you and you still agreed to have me. The least I can do is make you tea.”

John was transferred out of A&E for the night, and Sherlock was banished to the waiting area. John tried not to feel disappointed that there was no peck on the lips as he left.

In the morning, an uncomfortable visit with the physical therapist followed an even more uncomfortable chat with the alcohol counsellor, but finally John was told he was lucky to have no worse than a sprain, fitted with crutches, and released to his life. Released to Sherlock, who did not look patient, but hadn’t been thrown from St. Thomas’ either.

They rode to Baker Street in Mycroft’s car. Although they had agreed to something last night, in the light of day it seemed less clear quite what. The lingering rawness of the evening’s multi-layered debacle made John hesitate to reach for Sherlock’s hand. Sherlock didn’t do it either, and the silence grew heavy.

Sherlock got out first and held the crutches. His lips twitched.

“What?” John’s gracelessness and uncertainty made him irritable.

“Your shorts, John. I don’t usually see your knees. It feels titillatingly Victorian.”

“Only one knee.” The other was swathed in bandages.

“Fine. Something about your calves and smelling salts, then.”

John smiled in spite of himself.

Ascending the stairs slowly with a bum leg conjured déjà vu and a sense of wonder at just how much had happened in eighteen months.

They reached the living room and glanced awkwardly at each other and away. _Don’t suppose we can get right to the snogging._ John sighed. “I’m going to take a shower.”

“Of course. Excellent.”

Sherlock pronouncing an episode of personal hygiene _excellent_ was awkward indeed. John hobbled off to the bath.

He stripped off the black shirt he’d been wearing since before Sherlock returned to life and extricated himself from the shorts Mycroft’s people had provided. He unwrapped his knee and examined it. It was swollen fat and the skin pulled taut, but otherwise it didn’t look like much. Things had turned out much better than they could’ve.

He balanced on his left leg and the tip of his right big toe under the hot spray. The rhythm of the water and the normalcy of it were soothing, centring. _Yes, much better than they could’ve. Sherlock is alive and here and he wants… something… from me._ He let the water pelt him until his left quadriceps started to seize up. Then he quickly lathered, rinsed, and got out.

He stood at the sink to shave off his rough stubble and pat on aftershave. _Like I’m going on a date._ He smiled at the thought. He hoped it would be like that. With Sherlock, who knew?

John dressed in shorts and a clean t-shirt, re-wrapped his knee, and made his slow way back to the living room.

Where Sherlock was fiddling with the back of the telly, now sitting on the coffee table. Which also held steaming mugs of tea, a plate of toast, a bottle of paracetamol, and a bowl of ice cubes with a flannel draped over the edge. Pillows were stacked on the couch, topped by the Union Jack.

Sherlock glanced up at John and scowled. “I’m not ready yet. It seems it is nontrivial to move the telly.”

John took in the scene. It really was almost as disorienting as seeing Sherlock alive yesterday.

“Sherlock? What are you doing?”

“Really, John. Isn’t it clear? I’m making you comfortable.”

“Erm, thank you. But… why?”

“I don’t understand. How is this confusing? You’re injured, and I’ve gathered things for an injured person.” He suddenly looked uncertain. “Haven’t I? Perhaps you’d prefer sweets? Reading material? Or is it heat? I’m sure it’s ice, but –”

“Yes,” John interrupted. “Ice. But this –” he gestured with a crutch, “this… _attentiveness_ isn’t like you.”

“I humiliated you and almost killed you and you still agreed to have me. The least I can do is make you tea.”

 _Have you._ John shivered. “You were confused, the cab thing was my damn fault, and I –” _love you_ “– like you for yourself. The brilliant arrogant steamroller who secretly loves justice and can’t be arsed to make himself or anyone else tea. Sherlock, I don’t want _us_ to change _you._ ”

John paused. “Though if you get to Tesco,” the left corner of his mouth tugged upwards, “I’d love some liquorice.”

Sherlock grinned back. The Grecian perfection of his sculpted face was luminous with a smile. “Sit, John. I’ll tell you a secret.” He waited while John made his way to the couch, propped his right knee on the pillows, and reclined so his heart was below his knee. Sherlock settled himself on the floor and leaned back into the front of the couch at John’s left side. He slid a long leg under the coffee table.

Of its own accord, John’s left hand buried itself in the curls and began to caress. Sherlock emitted a deep satisfied sound.

“I’m not entirely clueless about social protocol. Are you surprised? I act in the manner best for the work, which generally does preclude politeness. Even when it doesn’t, it’s usually advantageous to maintain a certain image. And… fun. ‘ _Are you listening to me?’ ‘Don’t do that.’”_ His John impression was flawless. “‘ _Oh,_ Sher- _lock…’_ ” His Mrs Hudson was likewise spot on.

John barked out a surprised laugh. “You little rotter.”

“I’m always choosing among a range of equally tolerable behaviours. Regarding you, in particular, and all other things being equal, I now find myself inclined to do the thing most likely to please you. Shouldn’t you be icing your knee?”

John was too stunned to do anything but gather cubes in the flannel. The great and powerful Oz had peered around the curtain. It was fascinating, and weird.

John iced and drowsed, and Sherlock leaned and waited.

Finally he scooted round and knelt near John’s head. “John? Can I kiss you now?”

John’s eyes stayed closed but his grin split his face. He nodded.

Sherlock leaned in, and in, and in, until his lips were the barest whisper from John’s. He breathed there for a moment, then bent the final bit to make contact.

Sherlock’s first thought was _so warm._

John’s was _so full._

They pressed their lips against each other, touching more than kissing, until John craned his neck up to push into it. Sherlock’s left hand floated up and over to ghost down John’s cheek.

John opened his eyes and saw silver-blue and black, too close for focusing. _Eyes open, of course,_ some part of him observed. His lips parted and his mouth opened in the universal motion of _want more._

Sherlock obliged. He angled his head so their noses aligned instead of abutted and leaned in. He opened. Their tongue tips touched, traced, tangled. John moaned and reached for Sherlock’s neck, and Sherlock moved closer, deeper.

_Chime._

The world stopped. Their eyes locked.

Sherlock closed his and continued to kiss.

John turned his head to the right. “That was a text.”

“Mm. Busy.”

“Could be Lestrade.”

“Could be Mycroft.”

They had a three-inch staring contest. “You won’t know until you check, will you.”

Sherlock continued the match even after he knew he’d lost. “Fine,” he huffed, and dug in his pocket.

It was Lestrade.

_Emergency mtg now with Chief Supt and Mycroft. Come fix this bloody mess, get your damn job back. Save mine??_

“What does it say?”

“It… it’ll keep.”

“Bollocks. Show me.”

Sherlock complied, feeling at a disadvantage. Why did orders from John make him want to _do?_

John’s forehead creased. “What the hell, Sherlock, you were going to ignore that? You owe him. And your own –” The phone chimed again. “Er, Mycroft texts? I thought you were joking.” He handed the phone back.

Sherlock frowned. “When he –” _needs to be sure I’ll see it_ “– feels like it.”

_NSY now. NOW. Car waiting._

John looked at him expectantly and not at all romantically. Something had been a mistake. Having his phone on? Showing the text to John? He wasn’t sure what, but _something_ had been an utter miscalculation; John was going to withhold all further affection until he went. Stupid, ridiculous! He flounced and banged as only a consulting detective can and dove in for a stealth kiss as he swept out the door.

~~~

John absorbed the total stillness of the flat with Sherlock gone. It was glorious and creakily familiar, the quiet of _gone-but-coming-back._ He could hear Mrs Hudson moving around downstairs, and periodically there was a honk from the street or a thump through the wall from the Crick-Seversons next door. Conditioned for what to do during downtime, John reached for the remote.

But what he really wanted was Sherlock, and secondarily to talk about Sherlock. He reached instead for his phone and dialled. Harry picked up on the third ring.

“John! How are you?”

It was the work of a minute to tell of the several miracles that had unfolded over the last hours. But Harry focused on the wrong part.

“You got hit by a cab?”

“Yeah, but I’m fine. Sprained knee, it’s no worse than I got in that football match in the rain.”

“Because you were _drunk._ ”

“I know, it was stupid. I went –”

“You dealt with your feelings by going to get drunk.”

Hmm, this was a bit not good. “It was a one-time thing, Harry. I don’t –”

“Fuck you, John. Just fuck you.” She was livid, but John heard tears too. She hung up.

That wasn’t the kind of talking about Sherlock he’d meant to do.

~~~

“Your brother, who I respect, tells me –”

“Whom.”

“ _Sherlock!_ ” The name burst from Lestrade and Mycroft simultaneously.

Sherlock sat on a folding chair before the Chief Superintendent’s desk. Mycroft was on a sofa to one side, looking as always like he was more sensitive than others to the atmospheric concentration of faecal matter. Lestrade stood at attention in the corner, hands behind his back as if to impress the headmaster.

Sherlock clicked his teeth together.

The Chief Superintendent stared at him. “Your brother, _who_ I respect, tells me that you can explain us out of the absolute train wreck you have created here.”

Sherlock ground his molars.

“I find that dozens, _dozens,_ of my people have used you a shortcut to doing –”

“Hah! It’s not a shortcut if they’d never get there the long way.”

Lestrade tipped his head back to stare at the ceiling. Mycroft’s nostrils flared further.

The Chief folded his hands on his desk. “Mr Holmes. Let me be perfectly clear. Your ridiculous suicide has so far drawn only minimal attention to my department’s highly unorthodox, possibly illegal use of a volunteer civilian consulting detective. For three weeks the media has taken the personality angle, chasing interviews with your schoolmates and family and anyone who’s ever had tea with you. Have you been reading? People have a lot to say about you, not much of it nice.

“But now you want to reincarnate and clear your name! Of all the bloody… People will be _interested_ in your past work with the Met. Five years! Damn you, Lestrade. That’s a lot of cases and a lot of convictions.”

“Sir, it wasn’t –”

“Shut up, Lestrade!” the Chief roared. “You told me yourself you bloody started it! Holmes, it will be better for all of us if these cases don’t turn out to be hopelessly contaminated by the swanning of a weird vigilante.”

Sherlock sniffed. “I do not _swan._ ”

“Good Lord, nobody knows when to shut up! Keep quiet, you idiot! This morning Mycroft informed me that your death was a fake but you are not. He further described the light-handed and procedurally admissible way you have assisted us through the years. In particular on several high-profile wins that we do not want to come back up for discussion, like the Sorrentino murder and that ambassador fiasco.”

Sherlock deduced the objects on the Chief’s desk as a way to avoid looking at Mycroft. ( _Football fanatic, two children, nail biter._ ) He was in his debt for this.

“If you can convince me that Mycroft has accurately described your methods, perhaps all of us here will keep our jobs.

“But! If the public learns of any improper behaviour, _anything_ that results in a guilty person going free because you flouted the requirements of the law, _there will be no mercy._ You might not be a fraud, Mr Holmes, but the distinction will seem academic from prison. If things are bad enough, you might even have Lestrade and me there with you to explain the finer points of this cock-up.”

 _Ah. He wants me to help him avoid a scandal for the Met._ Sherlock couldn’t always read people, but once he understood a game’s rules of engagement, he could win.

He gave a wide, close-lipped smile. “Mycroft, how kind of you to burnish my image. Chief Superintendent, no one will find that I have done anything improper.” It was a fine shade of difference from _I have not done anything improper;_ Sherlock was a consummate professional at games of subtlety. “Or that Scotland Yard was anything but brilliant and civic-minded in consulting me. That is, of course, if that’s also how the Met sees it? You, and Lestrade, and… everyone I’ve worked with?” _You’ll need to get your people in line, Chief. Anderson and Donovan and the rest._

The Chief eyed him appraisingly and nodded. “Certainly. Thank you. One last question, then. How can I be sure you _didn’t_ do those things? Kidnap those kids?”

“You can’t, of course.” Sherlock heard Lestrade huff behind him. “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” _Best not dwell on that given my recent linguistic manoeuvring._ “Of course Sergeant Donovan will always be able to invent some silly theory about how I’ve masterminded whatever case you’re working on. How exhausting for her! But Occam’s razor! Russell’s teapot!” Sherlock looked around and clucked at the blank faces on the non-Holmeses in the room. He mentally lamented the state of general education. “Look. You need me. Lestrade knows it. Dimmock knows it. Pepper and Sangupta and Gregson know it. Is it really too much to think that –”

“Sherlock.” Lestrade’s tone was a warning. “You’re getting a chance here. Be civil.”

Sherlock turned to eye him levelly. “You’re getting a chance, too. Your best one, _Greg._ ” He spat the name like a four-letter word. “He’s willing to entertain the possibility that I’m not a megalomaniacal criminal who has tarnished your department’s _spotless_ reputation because that would be useful to him. Right, Chief?” He turned back for the answer.

The Chief pursed his lips and raised his eyebrows. Hmm, perhaps it was impolite to speak about the game. Despite what he’d claimed to John, Sherlock was rusty at civility.

“Pretty words are not going sway him,” he continued. “I have offered you plausible solutions for the things you think I did. Give me something I could not have done. Your choice. Something old and cold. I will tell you where to look. _You need me._ ”

It was a gamble. Sherlock was observant and intelligent, not a magician. He hoped he could produce something useful and convincing.

The silence in the room was absolute.

Finally the Chief Superintendent puffed out his jowls and pushed himself to his feet. “Come. You’ll sign the goddamned paperwork first. We’ll pay you; no more of this weird volunteerism. Donate it to the orphans if you need to work for free. Mycroft, do something about the background check. Sherlock, hand over your mobile. No phone-a-friend during your little test.”

~~~

During John’s fourth episode of Top Gear, Mrs Hudson brought up tea and insisted on fluffing his pillows.

“Sherlock’s off out, then?” She handed him a biscuit and stood by the telly.

John nodded.

“And how’s your knee?”

“Better than it could be, thanks.”

She shifted her weight. “Sherlock’s looking after you?”

“Mmhmm.”

“And that’s going alright? With him back and all?”

“Yes. Thank you for your concern.” John looked back to the screen.

“Alright, good, dear.” She continued to stand and look at him.

John didn’t meet her eyes. “Mrs Hudson, are you asking about our relationship?”

“Ooh, that’d make me a nosy parker, wouldn’t it.”

“Yeah.”

After several seconds he looked up. She was concealing a smile.

He rolled his eyes. “I… we… it’s early. There’s nothing to tell yet.”

“Alright, dear.” She smoothed her skirt and headed for the door.

John was sure he heard her murmur “old-fashioned” as she descended the stairs.

After three hours of football highlights, Demi arrived with dinner and flowers. She assured John that Harry was thinking of him even as she held him at arm’s length.

“Tell her I’m sorry, OK? It was stupid of me. She’s doing so brilliantly with her sobriety... I understand why she’s mad.”

“She’s really chuffed about this development with Sherlock, you know. But she can’t concentrate on that part until she’s sure you’re OK. Not about to follow in her old footsteps.”

John felt even smaller than he usually did. “I won’t. Tell her I’m proud of her.”

“Can I also tell her what happened? I’m confused. He’s alive after all and that upset you so much that… It doesn’t make sense. What else happened?”

Demi was the kind of person who inspired confessions. John confessed. Demi pronounced it a hopeful situation overall.

A few minutes after she left, John felt restless and went out for a walk. He made it halfway to Regent’s Park before he missed a step with a crutch, came down hard with his right foot, and went momentarily blind with the wave of pain from his knee. He turned around and made his way back home, much more slowly.

After hours more of crap telly and no word from Sherlock, he got ready for bed. He paused at the entrance to Sherlock’s room but that felt presumptuous. He made his way to his own room and waited for sleep.

~~~

It was near midnight when Sherlock identified the coarse brown hair on the homeless man’s jacket as from a native Rwandan Watusi cow. It was the nail in the coffin of the devious Médecins Sans Frontières volunteer who had long been suspected of the murder but never with enough evidence to be tried for it.

Lestrade nodded proudly, as though he was somehow responsible for the analysis. Dimmock let out a low whistle. The Chief Superintendent looked incredulous but hopeful. Mycroft had departed ages ago to attend to other affairs.

Sherlock wondered how many cases went unsolved simply because they were complicated or original and no one at the Met seemed to be capable of complex or original thought. Donovan was so wrong; he’d never be responsible for a body they found. To get any recognition at all from them he’d have to be so ham-fisted about it that the whole affair would be unbearably tedious. “Yes, so are we all finished looking over my shoulder now?” he asked politely.

The Chief rummaged in his pocket and offered Sherlock his mobile back. “I will need your written report of this examination within three days. Follow the form guidelines and don’t use abbreviations. Get your prickly little friend to help if you need a ghost-writer; we’ll get him retroactive clearance too.”

Sherlock considered again whether the price for access to the Met’s cases was too high. First giving up cocaine, now participating in the bureaucracy… He straightened his cuffs and started for the exit.

“Do _not_ leave that manual.”

Sherlock rolled his eyes and picked up the three-inch binder. Really, who printed these things out anymore?

Standing on the kerb waiting to hail a cab, he texted John.

_Coming home now. Where are you? SH_

He received a response in less than thirty seconds.

> _In bed._

  
_Whose?_

> _Mine…_

  
_Wrong._

Sherlock waited for the response… and waited. His face clouded over.

_I mean if you want it to be wrong._

Still nothing.

_John?_

Sherlock was superhuman in many things, but his ability to whip himself into a doubt-ridden lather over a new relationship was absolutely ordinary.

_I can come upstairs._

 

_Of course I can._

 

_Please, if you still want me to?_

 

When his phone finally chimed again, he laughed aloud and went limp with relief:

>  _Can’t use crutches on the stairs AND text, you lovely idiot. Calm down and get here._

  
~~~

At last he was home. Sherlock stood in his bedroom doorway and watched the steady rise and fall of John’s chest for a minute or maybe an hour.

He observed a t-shirt and deduced flannel pyjama bottoms, so when he resumed motion he silently changed into similar attire. He’d considered just stripping to his pants and hoping something interesting came of it, but there’d be time for all that later. Maybe forever. Hopefully forever.

When he turned back to the bed, John’s half-open eyes glinted in the dark. “… got a gorgeous arse,” he murmured.

Sherlock smiled, crawled under the covers, and cuddled up next to John, who had taken the left side of the bed so his bad leg was to the outside. He brought his lips to John’s ear. “It’s all yours,” he whispered.

John flopped over onto his left side and pulled Sherlock’s head forward with his right hand. His kiss was warm and sleepy. “God,” John breathed. “I want – I wahnt – I waaahhh…” His desire transformed into a lion-sized yawn.

“You want to sleep, I see.”

“Mmm. With you.” His eyes drifted shut as he smiled. “Both ways.”

Sherlock rolled onto his left side and fitted himself backwards into the curve of John’s body. At last, at last, he was home.


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Your heart rate is quite elevated. Which does it for you, the murder or the paperwork?”

John woke feeling warm and infused with the scent of Sherlock. And horny.

He’d rolled onto his back in the night, and Sherlock’s back and bum were resting along his left side and a little on top of him. Sherlock’s right shoulder was thrown awkwardly back and his right hand rested near John’s right hip.

Just about six inches from where it needed to be.

John dug into the bed with his left heel, pushed his hips up, and scooted gently right. A little less of Sherlock’s weight rested along his left side, and Sherlock’s right little finger was now within twitching distance of John’s goal.

John dug his heel in again and shifted his hips more vigorously.

Sherlock grunted. John paused.

Abruptly Sherlock heaved himself up, left, and over. He landed face down on his own side of the bed, not touching John at all.

John huffed out a frustrated breath and stared accusingly down his body at the swell under the blanket.

Then he heard the muffled wooden thumps of a drawer being opened and rummaged in.

Sherlock reared up onto his elbows, rolled the bottle of lube between his palms, and smiled sidelong at John. “Your way would’ve been hugely indirect and dissatisfying, John. Ask for what you want.”

 _Oh fuck. Who’s this now?_ The predatory eyes, the rumbling baritone gravelly from sleep, the dishevelled curls… John nodded and licked his lips.

Sherlock balanced himself on his right elbow and reached his left hand out to John’s face. He dragged his fingers from the temple, along the cheekbone, and over the lips. The first and second finger caught the lower lip and bent it down until it sprang back. The resultant dampness of the fingertips on John’s chin made his eyelids flutter. He whimpered.

The questing fingers continued under John’s chin, down his neck, and over the Adam’s apple. They slid side to side along the neck of his t-shirt, then folded over and dipped in, the nails scraping along John’s chest. John pressed his palms into the bed.

“Uh… how did the thing at the Met go?” he choked out. _At this rate I’m going to come before he touches my dick. Please God no._

Sherlock extracted his fingers from the shirt and dragged his palm down John’s chest to the hem. He slipped his hand underneath and caressed John’s belly.

“Mostly tedious, John. Continued employment all around. Murder and paperwork.” He snaked his hand up and rested it over John’s heart. His thumb lazily flicked the nipple. “Your heart rate is quite elevated. Which does it for you, the murder or the paperwork?”

 _Wrong_ , thought John, panicked. _Why did I think making him_ talk _would slow things down?_ He dug his fingers into the bed as his hips bucked up. _Think of cricket. Think of church. Think of… anything but that voice… that voice…_ John tried to regulate his breathing. His panting. “Paperwork, of course,” he ground out. “The thought of you at a desk always… Fuck.” He couldn’t continue the inane banter. He pressed his buttocks into the mattress. “Please, Sherlock.”

Sherlock’s hand migrated the wrong way. It neared the lower bound of the scar on his shoulder and John tensed.

Sherlock stopped. “Shh,” he soothed, wending the hand back south. “Not yet, OK, not yet.”

 _Jesus, “not yet?”_ The easy promise of _more_ of this and _later_ brought John right back to a sparking smoulder.

Sherlock’s hand grazed the waistband of John’s pyjama bottoms and he dipped one finger inside to scout the edge of the wiry hair there. John squirmed and pressed his lips together. He realised he was keening a toneless whine. Preferable to begging, he supposed.

“Like a Gregorian chant,” Sherlock smiled. “You’re so unexpected. So many details I never imagined when I thought about you while I was gone.”

Sod it, he’d beg. “Please, Sherlock, just touch me. Please.”

The insufferable tease complied – on the outside of the flannel. He rubbed his palm firmly along the length of the erection – John moaned – and reached under to cradle his testicles – John drove his head back into the pillow and bowed his back up off the sheets. “Please… oh please… I need… please…”

“Yes, John.” The voice was low and liquid. Sherlock shifted his weight to free his right arm and used both hands to drag the pyjama bottoms down to the middle of John’s thighs. The waistband caught on the top of the bandage on the right knee and Sherlock stopped pulling.

Stopped everything. John whimpered and opened his eyes as contact between their bodies was broken. He watched Sherlock squirt lube into his left palm, then slick his hands together to distribute and warm it. His tongue tasted the air. His inchoate thoughts were _want want need_ and _please please now_.

The moment flesh touched flesh John arched and growled. Sherlock encircled his shaft with his right hand and cupped his balls in his left. “You’re stunning,” Sherlock said as his pulled upward with one hand and rolled with the other. “Your cock is so beautiful, John. It’s so hard for want of this, of me, and I can feel you getting close. I’ve barely touched you yet and you’re so close. Should we make it last longer?” He lightened the pressure on John’s sac, slowed and gentled the movement of his right fist. “I could do this all day. The way you’re leaking, and so red at the tip, with your pyjamas rucked everywhere, and barely breathing –”

“Goddammit, please, fuck, don’t, _please_.” It didn’t make any sense. It wasn’t commanding like he’d hoped. It was desperate.

It worked.

Sherlock tightened his grip and stroked with conviction. At the top of every other stroke he flicked his thumb over the top of the sensitive head, spreading the precome that had wept everywhere.

Sherlock was right; he was so close. Within moments John felt the tension singing in every muscle of his body, every nerve gathering tight and focused on the slide and squeeze of Sherlock’s hand on him, and he gasped in the ragged breath that would feed him through the next long breathless seconds. “Fuck, yes, God, fuck, Christ, Sherlo– ” The name turned into a stuttered then soundless _ahhh_ as Sherlock flipped his thumb over the head one last time and John’s entire body convulsed and shuddered. He came onto his belly and t-shirt in strong, lavish pulses.

Sherlock’s hand slowed and gentled as John’s cock twitched out a few aftershocks and softened.

“I am very pleased with the way things are going, John.”

John dissolved into helpless giggles. “You posh berk. So glad things are meeting your expectations.” He wrestled his soiled t-shirt off, used it to wipe his belly, and tossed it to the floor. As he shimmied his pyjama bottoms back up to not seem so debauched next to his fully clad lover, Sherlock nuzzled his shoulder. His puckered, ugly shoulder.

John stilled. “Oh. Well, there’s that, then.”

“You’re… ashamed of it? I don’t understand. It looks like it’s healed rather well.”

“Sure, better than it could’ve.”

Sherlock pressed feathery kisses on and around the scar. It was circular, no more than three centimetres, with a slightly rough ridge around the darker centre. A few fine white lightning bolts radiated from it, concomitant injuries or perhaps the haste of field surgery subsequent to the trauma. “It’s part of you, John. It’s beautiful. Why does it upset you? Please tell me.” He searched for clues in the creases above John’s nose and at the corners of his eyes.

John sighed and stared at the ceiling. “Stupid vanity, really. I used to be… proud… of the way I looked without a shirt. Playing football or with a woman. Especially with my army ID discs, people loved that.” He grinned deprecatingly. “Like I said, stupid. Now I’m… marked by weakness, I guess. It’s the first thing people notice. They ask, like it’s their right to know. Or they go quiet and pretend they don’t see. Either way I’m right back to Afghanistan, and the hospitals, the therapist, the damn bedsit… the emptiness…” He blinked back the brightness in his eyes.

Sherlock kissed the bone of John’s shoulder. “All the things that brought you here. I’m grateful.” He pulled his lips back and nipped. “Still have the dog tags?”

John snorted in surprise, then laughed and shook his head. “You’re unbelievable. And perfect. I do. I had no idea you had such a filthy mouth. And, god, skilful hands. Where did you learn all that?”

“Filthy mouth yourself. Alternately cursing and calling on the Almighty as you climax. I’m no expert, but I think that might be blasphemy.” Sherlock leaned away to replace the lube in the drawer. He _felt_ John getting curious.

“Erm…”

Sherlock rested himself on his right side and laid his head on the pillow near John’s shoulder. He waited.

“Sherlock, you were really… confident… about that. I thought maybe…”

After a long moment of silence, Sherlock put the man out of his misery. “No polite way to enquire about my virginity?”

“Not really, no.”

“Gone a long time ago. But the evidence was overwhelming that sexual entanglements jeopardised the work, so I quit.”

“OK.” Pause. “Erm…”

“You’re an exception to pretty much everything.”

“OK. That’s good.” Pause. “Erm…”

Sherlock smiled. “Both, John. Women and men. But it’s been years.”

“Oh. OK.” John looked intimidated. It was a strange look for him.

 

Sherlock proposed a cooperative shower, but the logistics of John’s injury made it infeasible.

It turned out cooking was just applied chemistry, and Sherlock had toast and beans ready when John emerged fresh-scrubbed and relaxed. John quipped “Must really be love!” before he thought it through.

Sherlock’s eyes darted up to search his face and John looked away. “Uh, that’s awkward, sorry. Premature. I mean, hopefully pre– Jesus, I’ll shut up. Thanks for the beans.”

After breakfast John expressed a desire for fresh air and Sherlock sprang into action. John watched, fascinated, as Sherlock filled a messenger bag with snacks, painkillers, a blanket, reading material and sunscreen. “Best be prepared, John,” he said when he noticed the attention.

It took the better part of an hour to make it into Regent’s Park, and John was sweaty and cross by the time they stopped near the Inner Circle. He became less cross when they settled onto a bench near a lovely bed of begonias and Sherlock offered him water and liquorice.

“You actually went to Tesco?”

“The Express on the way home last night. I thought since you asked…”

“Brilliant.”

Sherlock loudly expelled air through his nostrils. “You can’t abuse that word just because we’re a couple now.”

John grinned. “Alright. But _that_ is brilliant. Lover.”

“Granted.” Sherlock looked away as he smiled but John saw.

They watched passers-by and Sherlock amused them both with his whispered deductions. _“Just quit his job.” “First date. She thinks they’re going to sleep together and he’s planning his grocery list.” “Wearing a corset and suspenders under that.” “Ex-circus clown.”_

“How could you possibly know!” John cried, clapping his hand on Sherlock’s knee for emphasis.

There was a moment of charged silence as John left his hand where it landed. He felt suddenly tense waiting for Sherlock’s reaction.

Sherlock shifted his weight into his feet, inched over, and settled closer to John. Their sides made continuous contact from shoulder to hip to knee, and the only natural place for Sherlock’s right hand was threaded under John’s left arm and resting on his leg. Sherlock leaned his head to the right and whispered, “We’ve kissed and traded orgasms. You can put your hand on my knee if you like.”

Neither man knew quite why he tried to hide his goofy smile from the other.

 

Sherlock looked smug when John requested the sunblock. The look faded when he also asked for the paracetamol. After another quarter hour, Sherlock pronounced it time to return home.

On the slow trudge back he deduced the chafing the crutches caused beneath John’s arms, but John seemed to not want to acknowledge it. Still, when they returned to the flat, Sherlock made John lie on the couch and remove his shirt so he could rub coconut oil into his sides.

That went the way one might expect, and Sherlock proved to be brilliantly skilled and irresistibly vocal with a blowjob.

 

The men spent the afternoon reading (and a little bit watching telly with the volume very low to not distress Sherlock). Sherlock kept John in ice and flannels.

John changed into pyjamas early and paused at the door to Sherlock’s room. “OK if I sleep here again?” he asked his flatmate, who was reading _A General Theory of Love_ in his chair.

Sherlock didn’t look up. “Of course. You didn’t keep me awake last night.”

John frowned. “Ah, I wasn’t too much of a bother, then.”

“No. Nor am I angry with you.”

“Take me with you, Sherlock. Would you like me to sleep in your room or not?”

Sherlock finally looked up, puzzled. “Isn’t that what couples do? Except when their sleep habits are incompatible or they’re cross with each other. We’re neither.”

“Your logic is reassuring, you clot, but there’s precious little conventional about you and that’s why I love you. So tell me clearly. Do you want me to move into your bed?”

“We could go to yours if you like. Mine’s closer to the loo, though.”

John rolled his eyes. “Yours, then.” Sherlock stayed intently focused on his face. He didn’t seem to be breathing. “Yes,” John sighed. “I said ‘I love you.’ And I mean it. I realised it when you were dead. But I know it’s too soon to go there. Sorry. Forget I said it, OK?”

Sherlock put his book down, stood, and went to John. He caressed John’s face and pressed kisses to his lips, his cheeks, his forehead.

John started to pull away.

Sherlock’s eyes skated over all the wrinkles and points of tension in his face. “Embarrassment?” he deduced. “Resignation… Mild disgust, self-directed. Is it… You think I’m kissing you to avoid responding to your words?”

John’s eyes flicked up, then away. _Yes, correct._

Sherlock dropped his hands to John’s shoulders. “No. John. I do not forget things about you. I will most certainly not start with that. How could it be too soon when I’ve been waiting my whole life?” His voice dwindled to a whisper. “I do too, you know. Love you. The evidence was conclusive when I finally thought to look. That’s OK?”

The tension in John’s face reordered itself into a bright, bright smile. “Well, aren’t we a pair. Damn shame that everybody bloody else in greater London knew before we did, huh?”

They kissed deep, slow, and long. John let his left crutch fall and clung to Sherlock instead.

“They didn’t have all the evidence. Speculation and inference,” Sherlock said when they leaned their foreheads together to breathe.

“Or hope,” John said.

 

Over the next several days, the bandaged knee proved a modern-day chastity belt or bundling board, with the same inconsistent results those devices have always had. John and Sherlock kissed and teased and brought each other off with hands and mouths and Sherlock’s expertly explicit narration, but John couldn’t manage a kneeling position, and Sherlock’s body stilled any time he heard John’s breath hitch in pain or his muscles tense from other than pleasure. How he knew the difference escaped John.

Their endeavours were not uniformly successful in the traditional sense. Sixty-nining sounded sexy when John proposed it from his back on the bed, but their relative geometries meant that Sherlock had to curl his spine more than was medically advisable, and John got a firm thrust of a firm dick in the left eye. He contracted debilitating giggles that spread to Sherlock, and was then further poked in the face in time with Sherlock’s laughter. The _feelings_ of being in love with Sherlock were very like the times he’d been in love before (though he suspected this level of joy was unique), but some of the _mechanics_ were quite different.

Mrs Hudson was conspicuously absent from their doorway for the first three days, and conspicuously loud with her “Ooh, ooh, boys!” when she brought up tea on the fourth.

Though it was half four and both men wore their dressing gowns, she didn’t remark on it. “Here, Sherlock, pass the biscuits. How’s the knee, John?”

“Improving, thanks. Not at full activity yet.”

Sherlock smirked. John blushed. Mrs Hudson’s twinkly eyes stayed on the stream of tea as she poured. “Oh, lovely. Soon you’ll be better than new. Here, I’ve brought up the post and the papers.” She gestured at the small mountain of business cards on top of the letters. “Hope you don’t mind, I’ve just been collecting cards and sending the reporters away. Such a lot of interest in you, Sherlock. It seemed better for you to have some privacy.”

John realised he had paid exactly no attention to the wider world since Sherlock’s return. They were nearing a state of literally nothing to eat in the house. (The last time John had gone for groceries it was for one, and one who didn’t care overmuch.) He also hadn’t thought of the blog once; that was peculiar. Though to be fair the next post might be complicated to write.

Mrs Hudson discussed the skull on the mantel with Sherlock, who thought he might adopt her practise of adding daisies. John paged through the papers to see what the world was saying about his flatmate. _Boyfriend,_ he corrected himself. _Lover? Partner?_

_Everything._

The news seemed exactly the same as when he’d stopped paying attention almost a month ago: Political strife in the Middle East, financial troubles in Europe, young celebrities and royals behaving in comment-worthy ways, record-breaking weather patterns. Even the articles about Sherlock had the same excited, wondering tone they’d had then.

This was a 180 degree reversal from the news he’d mostly ignored after the Riley exposé and Sherlock’s fall. He’d understood all too well the tone of those stories based on the questions reporters asked him at the funeral.

Sherlock, it now seemed, had orchestrated his own disgrace, faked his death, and gone undercover to neutralise a domestic terrorist cell. All the Queen’s subjects owed him a debt of gratitude.

“Just like that, you’re back and they love you again?”

Sherlock glanced at the newspaper. “It’s not difficult to appear a genius when you actually are.”

Mrs Hudson’s lips twitched and John hid a smile.

“What?” Sherlock said. “Is that where I’m supposed to pretend modesty?”

“God no,” said John. “You’d be insufferable, Mr Bond. Never mind. It’s from a movie.”

Further, John read, Sherlock Holmes was finishing up a well-deserved rest after his heroic efforts and appreciated privacy for the moment. Flatmate Dr John Watson had no official comment but seemed relieved to be done with the charade. Chief Superintendent Rigby was keen to consult Holmes and Watson on several difficult matters soon.

“This is Mycroft’s influence, I assume?” John asked. “How much of what I read in the papers is actually true?”

Sherlock smiled faintly. “Most of it unless there’s good reason.”

“And is _this_ why you’ve insisted on keeping the curtains closed? I knew it couldn’t be modesty.” He saw Mrs Hudson look up, realised the implication, and floundered a moment before deciding if everyone else was amused by their love nest then he just would be too. “So, no mention of Moriarty?”

“It complicated things too much.”

“And reporters have really honoured this request for privacy?”

“I’ve received some emails. But I’ve misplaced my mobile and Mrs Hudson tells me there’s been some trouble with the bell to our flat.”

“Dreadful bother of a problem,” she chimed in. “I believe it will be fixed tomorrow.”

John looked from one dear face to the other and inexplicably felt tears prick his eyes. “OK, last question. When do you come up with this stuff? You haven’t left my side in three days.”

“Mycroft did most of the legwork. And you sleep rather a lot for a grown man.”

 

That evening, John left the crutches leaning against the mantel and perfected a heavy shuffling limp. They went to Angelo’s for a celebratory dinner.

The effusive proprietor greeted them with customary élan. “Anything on the menu for my friends!”

John was chuffed to be named Angelo’s friend in his own right, never mind the free food. John beamed at Sherlock, Sherlock beamed at John, and Angelo walked off beaming at everyone. It had taken some time, but it seemed that first tea light had finally done its job.

Testament to their deep familiarity with one another, Sherlock only boggled John once during the meal. This was when he said: “I’ve been thinking. When we take our sexual relationship further, you should penetrate me first, since that will seem more familiar to you.”

John aspirated wine (just a little) and felt his cock twitch. “Erm, if you want. But, uh, I have done that before. Had anal sex.”

“No, I’m talking about receiving. ‘Bottoming,’ I believe it is.”

“Yes. That. So am I.”

Sherlock’s face fell. “Oh. I appear to have erroneously assumed that you hadn’t been with a man before me.”

John reached across the table for a long hand gone rigid. “Sherlock, love, you’re my first and only.” He struggled mightily to maintain eye contact. He’d imagined himself so worldly about sex… Maybe it had never mattered this much. “I had an enthusiastic girlfriend a while back who wanted to try a strap-on. So I… received… a few times.”

“You didn’t like it.” Sherlock was never any good at hiding his disappointment, though John could see he’d tried.

“I did like it.” John gave up on the eye contact but squeezed Sherlock’s hand harder. “A lot. I just didn’t like her as much.”

The excitement that lit Sherlock’s face was just the same as when he made a brilliant deduction.


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sherlock and John get back into the swing of things. Which means getting out of the swing of other things.

DI Lestrade didn't have the surveillance resources of a Mycroft Holmes, but he was paying enough attention to the public return of his favourite consulting detective to know of the penne all’arrabbiata at Angelo’s. Finally the blokes of Baker Street were rejoining the world.

It was a lucky thing. Relations with the Chief Superintendent were still tenuous, and Greg was running out of ways to justify putting off consulting Sherlock on the long-and-getting-longer list of vexing cases with which the Met needed his assistance. Chief Rigby was full steam ahead after Sherlock’s bravura performance on his cold-case test; he was growing increasingly impatient with Greg’s poorly explained reluctance to throw him back into the fray. Lestrade didn’t think “It’s probably an emotional time for Sherlock and his flatmate and we need to give them space to work it out” would go down so well.

Never mind that he quietly hoped they’d work it out in one particular odds-defying way. They deserved that happiness.

Still, the first text he typed upon hearing of the meal at Angelo’s was not to Sherlock but to Molly Hooper.

_-Don’t know what it was, Mol, but S & J are back on their game and I think whatever you said to S at A&E started it. Good work._

He stared at the text for a long time after he’d sent it. He’d had greater reason to talk with Molly recently because of Sherlock’s death and return, and he was intrigued by the new self-possession he saw in her. But ‘Mol’? Would she think he was flirting? _Was_ he flirting? God, maybe it was some pathetic knee-jerk reaction to his creeping age. Nothing made you feel washed-up like haggling over your future pension with your ex-wife’s solicitor; he knew this in his bones after yesterday. _Flirting with sweet Molly Hooper. St Bart in a balaclava. If she’s kind she’ll pretend she didn’t notice. Too pretty for me by half and too young by… Jesus, don’t do the maths._ He forced the thought aside and tried to compose a case-related text that might intrigue Sherlock.

 

“A case, John!” Sherlock cried, springing from bed and poking at his mobile. “Lestrade’s got a victim dead at least a week, but his colleagues swear he was at work two days ago. This could be interesting!”

“Mmph,” John grunted, rolling over into the warm Sherlock-scented depression in the mattress. “Thought you were asleep.”

“Of course not. I’ve been experimenting with your subconscious stimulus processing for the last forty minutes. You're quite an obstinate sleeper.”

“Obstinate? Wait, experimenting?”

“You reacted physically to everything from light touches and tickling to distinctly sexual stimuli but refused to regain consciousness. It seems that you find my leaving bed a relevant stimulus; duly noted for future Watson-waking. Make me toast?”

Sherlock was out of the room before John could suggest he make good on his 'distinctly sexual stimuli,' and he was off to Scotland Yard before John was out of the shower. (Cold.)

John made tea and straightened the sitting room. He found a thick binder under a pile of newspapers and settled in to learn the particulars of Sherlock's new, official relationship with the Met.

He read the table of contents with alarm. _God, he's going to get sacked straight away._ It listed a procedure index, a form index, and a chain of command with nineteen subsections. There was no way Sherlock had looked at these, and even less of no way he’d follow them. But the wrinkled employment contract shoved in the back pocket and scrawled with Sherlock's impatient signature indicated his agreement with these very things. John went for his mobile.

_-Greg. My god. You're going to have to give him the sack._

> _-Ha, found the contract? Chief required it. Care to be his_
> 
> _-um_
> 
> _-handler?_

John couldn’t help but grin. Did Greg know already? John had been too deliriously foggy in hospital to remember just what he’d said to his bedside visitors or what impression he and Sherlock had given at the time.

_-Yes. I will handle him._

He spared Greg the rest: _All case long. And after that, too, until we both need a damp flannel and a lie-down._

 

In the week that followed, Molly Hooper saw more of John and Sherlock than she’d done in the six months prior, but she saw them separately. Sherlock would come first, swooping into the morgue to examine a victim’s dentition or inner eyelids, or pacing between microscopes and centrifuges in the lab to examine jumper lint or soil microbes. He was himself to the Sherlockth degree: abrupt, focused, inscrutable. Genius. Alone. Then, from a few steps or hours behind, John would show up to conduct Sherlock’s messy brilliance into procedurally admissible order.

But that was alright. Molly’d learned how things stood from Mrs Hudson. Two days after John’s accident Molly stopped by Baker Street with the long-promised ham, thrilled to offer a get-well-soon meal instead of a lying-for-your-own-good condolence supper for one. The landlady gently intercepted her and offered to present it on her behalf ‘when the boys are more disposed to having callers.’ _Smile. Wink._ Molly clapped both hands over her mouth to stifle an undignified squeal.

Besides, she couldn’t fault Sherlock for going on a science binge after he’d been in hiding for so long, and John’s quiet enthusiasm for the joint venture was obvious.

“So…” Molly asked as she peeled back John Doe's lips for John's examination and documentation. “... How’s it going?”

“Great, thanks. Sorry, expose that molar a bit more?”

“Oh good.” She waited as long as she could. “... And how’s Sherlock?”

“Great, yeah. Hey, thanks for the food.”

“Of course. Mrs Hudson said…” Perhaps it wasn’t polite to say what Mrs Hudson said.

John looked up and saw Molly’s mouth working soundlessly. “That our doorbell wasn’t working?”

“N– yes. Yes. That’s… yes.”

“Yeah, it’s definitely working now.” John laughed dryly. “Now that there’s nothing to disturb.”

Molly started to ask why that was funny but choked as she realised John might be making a joke about Sherlock’s single-mindedness while on a case. _Oh God. Was that a sex joke? Oh GOD._

Her own fantasies about Sherlock had chiefly involved Sherlock expressing surprised praise for her pathology skills, or an accidental brush of hands across a piece of lab equipment provoking a soulful gaze. Rarely there was a soft-focus kiss, but Molly’s imagination generally failed at that point. It was _Sherlock,_ after all.

So while she was very ready to imagine Sherlock and John _in love,_ John’s cheeky grin as he wiggled John Doe’s number 30 molar flustered her to the point that she changed the subject to the first thing that came to mind.

“Well, anyway. Do you ever think of me as ‘Mol’?”

“‘Mol’? Like, short for Molly? Er, not really, why?”

“Sorry, if you did, what would it mean?”

“Well, that we were chummy, I suppose. Who’s calling you ‘Mol’?”

“Chummy. You’re probably right. ‘Mates.’ Need me to pull that tongue out of your way?”

 

Sherlock wasn’t entirely unaware that he’d barely seen John in days. Nor did it escape his attention that thinking about their effective return to platonic flatmate status was significantly correlated with bouts of gastrointestinal distress.

But the _cases!_ The Met might be courting him for all the plum puzzles they’d offered. Irreconcilable CCTV footage showing two different versions of the same shop robbery, a locked-room lights-out poisoning at a cutthroat holiday camp for musicians, and _exploding sheep._ Exploding _bloody_ sheep, John would say. Sherlock smiled whenever he thought of John’s foul mouth.

Though he was minutely focused on the cases, Sherlock made periodic efforts to verbally recognise John.

“John, you’re invaluable to the Work,” he said when he thought of it on Thursday.

“We should get Chinese after we’ve wrapped things up,” he suggested on Friday.

“Dimmock said the way you tap tackled that carpenter would’ve been a highlight of the Six Nations Championship,” he said Sunday. “I think that’s something about sport. You’re quite virile.”

On Monday: “You know I appreciate your patience.”

“You’re the perfect partner, John,” he murmured Tuesday.

It simply happened that John was never present when Sherlock thought to say these things. Lestrade, unfortunately, _was_ crouching next to him to examine a footprint when he said that last, and Sherlock caught him hiding a smile. “Shut up, Lestrade,” he said.

 

On Tuesday evening, Mycroft had forty-nine unscheduled minutes between his meeting with the Countesses of Sandwich and the briefing on disaster relief allocations. On a whim, he directed his driver to New Scotland Yard and phoned the Chief Superintendent. It was high time to check on Sherlock’s reintegration – _be precise, Mycroft: integration_ – into the Metropolitan Police Service, and this would be just enough time for a tête-à-tête.

Unfortunately, the Chief’s desk phone, mobile, and other mobile all rang through to voicemail. It was vexing; they’d already arrived at NSY by the third missed connection. Mycroft pursed his lips and was about to tell the driver to continue on when he saw a familiar black trench coat push through the front door.

“Please invite Inspector Lestrade to join me, Marcus,” Mycroft said through the intercom. The driver parked at the kerb and got out to collect Greg. Mycroft watched their brief exchange through his tinted window. If Lestrade was intimidated by the burly messenger and sinister automobile, he didn’t show it.

“If this is extraordinary rendition, Mycroft, I hope you’re taking me someplace with a beach,” Greg said, getting into the car. He jerked his hand away from the handle when Marcus closed the door firmly. Not a man used to having things done for him, Mycroft thought as the car pulled back into traffic.

“Hardly. I’d like a first-hand account of how my brother is getting on with your division.”

“He’s made it crystal clear that we’re all great tits who can’t manage without him. So, pretty well back where he left off.”

“And the additional responsibilities?”

“You mean, how’s he doing with the paperwork? Remains to be seen. But it looks like John’s helping with that, so I think it’ll work out.”

“Acceptable; please keep me apprised of any issues. You feel confident in your job?”

Greg ran a hand through his silver hair, back to front. “As confident as anybody who’s just missed the noose, I guess. The Chief’s drooling over the cases Sherlock could close for us, which bodes well for my whole division. Thanks for your help with that.” He smiled in Mycroft’s direction.

It made him look positively boyish. Mycroft found himself smiling back. He quashed it. “It’s self-interest. He tolerates you best. Shall we drop you at home?”

Greg glanced out the window. “Please. Hey, doesn’t Molly Hooper live around here?”

Mycroft was startled to realise he’d entirely lost track of their route. He reoriented himself and wondered how Greg knew where Molly lived. Did they socialise? It was Mycroft’s _duty_ to keep track of the people in Sherlock’s life, so of course he knew. “Yes, two streets west.”

“Thought so. So, Sherlock and John, huh?”

Was he insinuating what it seemed? “Beg pardon?”

“Sherlock and John. Together?”

Perhaps he was fishing for confirmation; best be circumspect. “Yes, of course they’re together again. He only intended to stay away as long as it took to protect the three of you.”

“No. _Together._ ”

Mycroft maintained his moue for three more seconds before breaking into a face-splitting grin. He turned away to school his features. When he turned back, Greg was beaming.

He’s quite handsome, Mycroft thought. One wouldn’t think it with that precious blunt nose, but – _good Lord, what?_ “How do you know?”

“Sherlock’s been talking to John all week, doesn’t even realise when he’s not around, and some of it’s sentimental. John’s happy, ‘course he’d be, but he’s smug, too. Looks like the damn cat that got the cream.”

After two slow heartbeats, Lestrade processed the innuendo. His eyes grew large and he turned away. “Erm.”

Mycroft’s lip twitched. “Fortunately for you, tasteless insinuation is not illegal. If it was –”

“Hey!” Greg interrupted, neck craning backwards. “I think that was Molly!”

Mycroft signalled the driver, who turned on his hazard lights and backed up alongside the woman on the pavement. It was indeed Dr Hooper, and she was on the verge of angry tears. She was glaring at a small dog on a leash.

No, not a dog. A cat.

Greg jumped out. Mycroft watched from the car as Molly looked up and her pretty face transformed with self-conscious pleasure. She gestured animatedly at the cat on the ground. Mycroft couldn’t hear the words, but Greg’s deep laughter resonated.

Greg poked his head in. “Molly tried to walk her cat but he’s stopped and refuses to be carried, so she’s stuck. Think we can give them a lift?”

Mycroft looked past him to where Dr Hooper was stymied by a one-stone ball of fluff. He sighed and nodded.

Lestrade threw his coat over the cat, dumped the moaning bundle at Mycroft’s feet, and slid in next to him. Molly followed. “Hi, Mr – Mycroft. Hi. Sorry. Toby hates being picked up. Thanks. Sorry. Thanks, Greg.”

Mycroft shifted politely right to detach his hip from Lestrade’s. Toby emerged from the coat, hissed at the two engineers of his indignity, and wedged himself between Mycroft’s bespoke shoes.

Molly and Greg made pointless conversation until they reached Molly’s flat. Greg gallantly volunteered to get her cat inside and then make his own way home. Mycroft left them to their flirtation and continued on to his next engagement.

 

When he wasn’t following up on leads for Sherlock, John spent his week of virtual bachelorhood attending to corporeal needs.

Not just the sexual ones, though he did construct elaborately sordid post-case fantasies and wank in toilet cubicles more than he’d done since he was fifteen.

He spent three hours at Tesco gathering supplies to restock all of their cupboards. They’d been down to their last loo roll. The cashier was so slow and surly that John half wished he would’ve chosen the self-service checkout, chip-and-pin be damned.

He monopolised 221’s washing machine for six successive cycles. He hadn’t done laundry during Moriarty’s Sherlock-baiting, so he rediscovered clothing that had sat in hampers for months. There was something poignant about pairing socks that hadn’t met feet since before his heart had been ripped out, abruptly returned, trod on, then expanded three sizes.

He cooked in military quantities so there would always be something ready in case Sherlock thought to eat, and he shared several suppers with Mrs Hudson.

He iced and rested his injured knee as often as he could, and made a valiant effort to do his sodding physical therapy. The attention paid off; by Tuesday his limp was nearly gone.

The blend of easy domesticity and Sherlock in his element tinged John’s whole world rose. He’d never get enough of watching or nurturing that brilliance.

Though when John brought Sherlock a plate of mashed potato and Sherlock absently piled dissected insect carcasses in the depression meant for gravy, it did cross his mind to be miffed at Greg. Could the criminal elements of London really have been _so_ busy and _so_ devious in the three weeks Sherlock was gone? How would the Met cope if they ever went on holiday to Australia?

John smiled and kissed the crown of Sherlock’s head. If Sherlock ever went to Australia, he’d gladly Skype some poor sod around British crime scenes from the Southern Hemisphere. John _hmm_ ed happily at the thought of snapping Sherlock’s laptop shut and peeling a bedsheet off him in a Melbourne bed and breakfast. Then he cleared away the buggy potatoes and phoned Sarah to see if she’d let him return to the surgery.

Sherlock brushed vaguely at his hair. He looked up from the microscope in the kitchen to kiss John back, but an hour had passed, and John was no longer home.

~~~

With three rapid-fire flashes of insight, Sherlock solved the remainder of Greg's backlog and dashed off instructions about whom to arrest (the lover, the son-in-law, and – how deliciously cliché – the butler). He pocketed his mobile and looked around, dazed. He’d appropriated a conference room at NSY and managed nine investigations simultaneously. The photos and minutiae from the six previously solved cases were stacked to one side. The detritus of the other three cases was arranged in the non-linear way that best facilitated his deductions. He shook his head to clear it and looked out at the office – deserted, silent, and bathed in the low green light of vacancy. What time was it? What day? The mobile reappeared: half two on Thursday morning.

Sherlock’s body took over for his mind in a changing of the guard to do Buckingham Palace proud. He was suddenly starving and exhausted.

And homesick. He’d been at the flat occasionally during the week, even slept a little there, but it wasn’t enough. Every interaction with John had been about the cases. Sherlock’s gut twisted with longing and he stumbled to his feet. On his way out, he broke into Lestrade’s office and raided his stash of biscuits and sultanas so he could get into bed with John the moment he got home.

After an endless cab ride, Sherlock staggered up his seventeen steps and lurched through the streetlit living room discarding articles of clothing, so tired he felt inebriated. He was down to his pants and a sock when he fell into bed next to John’s warm, peaceful solidness.

When he regained consciousness twelve hours later, his clothing including the persistent sock was cleared away and there was a note from John on the bedside table: _Curry in the fridge. Three minutes in microwave (moved yr toes to worktop). Making locum arrangements at surgery, back soon. Please EAT._

Sherlock ate the curry cold out of the container and wandered around the flat in his pants. It was the first time he’d really been home alone in a month, save the awful minutes after he’d driven John away on that first night. _Should I delete that? God, I want to. But it’s so connected. I’m certainly archiving what came before, the first time his mouth was on me. And then afterwards, in hospital, when he smiled so beautifully and didn’t hate me..._

Sherlock meandered over to examine the neat sheaf of collated pages on the coffee table.

It was a pile of six case reports printed on the horrible fussy forms from the Met. There were Post-It flags noting where his signature was needed, and a fountain pen next to the pile. Sherlock had a sudden vision of John typing out the infernal paperwork with two fingers, coddling and cursing their jam-prone printer, and expending conscious thought on which pen to set out. His tongue would’ve poked out between his lips as he tapped the edges of the stack against the table to straighten it... Sherlock's knees wobbled and he sank onto the sofa in a whole-body paroxysm of love.

He was parched for John. Starving for him.

The sex conversation at Angelo’s seemed a lifetime ago. Not only had they not attempted anything new since then, penetrative or otherwise; they hadn’t done anything at all since their three days of one mostly continuous sex act.

Objectively, he had seen John over the past week, spoken with him, and kissed him a bit while leads percolated.

They’d even napped together while Sherlock’s subconscious organised data. John had spoken back, returned kisses, and cheerfully gone on research errands. It suddenly seemed like so much white rice. Sherlock was ravenous for John’s body.

_I need him. As close as we can get, as soon as possible. I want him inside me the moment he gets home,_ Sherlock thought, heading for the en suite.

_Finally,_ smiled his inner narrator.

_Oh, shut up,_ thought Sherlock.

 

An hour later Sherlock stood at the mirror, weighing the merits of three shirt-buttons undone versus four, and contemplating the phenomenon of listening to speech underwater. Or adjusting a microscope with mittens. Or walking on numb pins-and-needles legs.

His entire present experience of the world was muffled by lust. Every shift of his lower body yanked his focus in and down.

Familiar footsteps thumped on the stairs. Sherlock crossed unsteadily to the door and only thought “No, _mostly_ familiar” as he threw it open.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Poor Sherlock. Poor reader. But you’ll both get what’s coming to you next week; it’s already written. It was just too big to fit out the door all at once. Happy holidays!


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The finest gift.

Sherlock had never met Harry Watson, but there was no deductive genius required to identify this female-but-not-feminine image of John. Her tongue flicked her lower lip as she stared back at him and Sherlock experienced a horrifying, confusing jolt of arousal.

“What?” he snapped, just as she began, “Hi, I’m –”

“Of course you are. What do you want?”

Had Sherlock learnt nothing of Watsons? Her brow furrowed and her lip curled in amused annoyance. “To see my brother, you git. Is he home?”

“No.”

“Back soon, then?”

“No.”

“Liar. He said he’d be home by five. Can I come in?”

“No.”

She was already in. Could there be a genetic component to this, a familial resistance to Sherlock’s innate offensiveness?

“Where are your cushions?” She stared at the crumby cushionless expanse of sofa bottom.

Sherlock opened his mouth, then closed it. He stepped away from the door. The plug in his bottom jammed his train of thought with a pulse of sensation.

Harry watched him interestedly.

“I am unused to lying as a social nicety,” he ground out.

“Sorry, what? You’ve done something indecent with the cushions? Fantastic, but do spare the details.”

“I wasn’t going to _give_ details!”

“Sure you were, if it’d scare me away, but then you worried what John would think. That’s sweet.”

“It’s not _sweet!_ ” Sherlock would never, never operate a microscope with mittens. How had he allowed himself to engage with the world from within this sex-addled fog?

“Smart, then.” She brushed crumbs to the floor and sat on the hard couch bottom. The seat was especially low without the cushions. “Quick now, before he gets here. What do you want from my brother?”

Sherlock took an angry step toward her, intending to loom and cow. The sudden movement sent another shockwave out from his arse; it bloomed like fireworks in his forearms and chest. His absurd arousal and vulnerability in the face of this challenging stare levelled – no, trained _up_ – at him triggered a well-worn defence mechanism.

“Serial cheater,” he began. “Recovering alcoholic but you still crave the smell of liquor. Guilty about all the ways you’ve disappointed John. Significant credit card debt. Allergic to strawberries. Uncomfortable around children but you’re considering –”

Harry’s barked laugh startled Sherlock into silence. “What was that?” she asked.

Sherlock twisted his mouth sourly and didn’t answer.

“No, really. Obviously you don’t want me here. But you’re going to chase me off by sneering at my strawberry allergy?”

It wasn’t his best showing. The ruddy butt plug was throwing everything off. “It… I was distracted.”

“Sherlock, I’m no prize. That’s no bloody secret. People say the same about you, but John thinks otherwise, and he _is_ one. So that means something. It literally broke his heart when you died.”

“That word does not mean what you think.”

“What, ‘literally’? Nope, God’s honest truth. He didn’t tell you? Anyway, I need to see him.”

“To make sure he’s not a budding alcoholic,” Sherlock snapped. “Ridiculous.”

“Hmm, he did tell you that, then. Figures. No, to apologise.”

“Apologise for what?” John asked from the doorway. “And where are the cushions?”

“Apologise for putting my issues on you. How’s your knee? Your pretty what-should-I-call-him has done something untoward to the couch.” She went to John and kissed his cheek.

John returned the peck. “Knee’s good, just a bit stiff.” He moved smoothly to Sherlock. “Slept off your back-to-work detecting spree, then?” He squeezed Sherlock’s elbow. “And met Harry? How’d that go?”

“I’m right here,” she said.

“She’s unsettlingly like you.”

“You like her; brilliant. Hear that, Harry?”

She grinned. “What a pair. God. I can’t handle the male pheromones much longer. Plus, ew, my brother. But really, John, I’m sorry for how I was on the phone.”

“Human pheromones?” Sherlock exclaimed. “The worst kind of non-science!” He stalked stiffly to the mantel and scooped up his skull, a talisman against nonsense.

“Or whatever this is.” Harry waved her hands at the air between John and Sherlock, dispelling pheromones.

John eyed Sherlock. “Why are you walking like you’ve –”

“Injured my back?” Sherlock interrupted smoothly. John’s dear, guileless face had telegraphed _got a stick up your arse,_ and there was no cause to get into that in front of Harry. “It’s nothing. A little tweak from that tumble down the stairs.”

They held each other’s gaze across the room and largely failed at telepathy, though John finally understood something enough like _don’t push it_ to turn back to Harry. “I understand why you were worried. I do.”

Harry flapped her hands again, dismissing the words. “No, that wasn’t fair or kind of me. Demi told me everything you told her. Again, ew. But mostly she told me how happy you were. And, God, John, that’s fantastic. I can see it in you, and your praying mantis over there just wants me to leave so he can – OK, stopping there. Mazel tov, you two, l’chaim. I’ll quit interrupting. Dinner with me and Demi on Saturday?”

John looked to Sherlock.

Sherlock looked at John. Those black-blue eyes, the expressive creases, the inviting lips…

The inviting lips smiled. Pretty teeth. Delicious? How to find out?

“Yeah,” said the lips. “If there’s no case on. Thanks for coming, Harry. Bye.”

Sherlock’s eyes flicked to the closing door. “She’s uncannily like you.”

“Oi, repetition? You’re far gone, love. Did you eat the curry?”

“Yes. Come to bed.”

John laughed. “I see you’ve been preparing.”

“What do you mean?” Sherlock felt the blood drain from his face. Was the toy so obvious? Would John be angry that he’d flaunted it in front of Harry?

“Four buttons undone, smooth cheeks, the cologne that says ‘come bite’? Doesn’t take a genius. However. _I_ will take a genius. You. Just, first, I’m starving, yeah?”

And just like that, John’s upper half disappeared into the refrigerator.

It was too much for one man to bear.

Sherlock followed John into the kitchen and positioned himself behind the body bent at the waist to dig in a crisper drawer. He laid his palms on John’s hips and rocked his groin forward into John’s bum. He pushed the bottom of John’s shirt up to reveal a line of warm skin, then trailed his fingers from one side to the other. He bent down and kissed along the invisible trail left by his fingers, kisses soft but insistent from pliant lips. His tongue slipped out to taste.

John’s hands went still in the crisper.

“Are you very hungry, John?” he purred.

John straightened and turned. “Yeah, starving.”

Sherlock reluctantly stepped back. He could wait. He wouldn’t actually injure himself with his searing erection. Probably not.

“It’s just,” John dragged his palm across his mouth, “I’ve changed my mind about what I’m starving _for._ ” John grazed Sherlock’s face with his left hand and swung the fridge shut with his right.

Sherlock groaned with relief and mashed his face into John’s, sliding his hungry mouth about until it locked over John’s. He pressed John back against the refrigerator and ground every possible inch of his length into John’s front.

This rocked the plug forcefully inside him, and his knees buckled as he swallowed a wail. He grabbed for John’s shoulders, and John’s arms tightened around his waist.

John angled his neck, trying to get a look at Sherlock’s face. “Hey, what’s going on? You OK? Is it your back?”

“My… back?” Sherlock panted, looking up at John with eyes that were mostly pupil.

“Yeah, from your fall down the stairs? I can take a look –”

Sherlock smiled slowly. “Ah, right. That wasn’t strictly true. But I do think it best if you take a look.” He slunk upwards ( _slinking up,_ John thought, _didn’t know it could be done_ ) to his full limber height. He leaned his lips down to John’s ear and whispered, “This way, please,” punctuating the request with a warm, wet lick and, below, a swirl of hips. Then he was off to the bedroom.

With Sherlock’s pressing weight gone, John slid halfway down the refrigerator before he regained verticality. He launched himself through the kitchen and after Sherlock.

Sherlock stood before the bed undoing his buttons and watching John.

John saw the bed and paused. “Er, the cushions…” The sofa cushions, their bed pillows, and a multi-folded duvet were stacked in a two-foot-high row beginning in the centre of the bed and stretching to its foot.

Sherlock undid the last button and yanked his shirt tails free. He let the garment hang open and began on his flies. “If you’re amenable, John, I’d like you to fuck me in the arse now.”

John exhaled liked he’d been punched in the gut. “I’m amenable, you posh bastard. Fuck. I’ve thinking about that all –”

He broke off as Sherlock slithered out of trousers and pants and laid back onto the pile of cushions. One shoulder fell wantonly out of the unbuttoned shirt. His erect cock bobbed gently against his stomach. “The cushions are for your knee. You can stand there at the end and have sex with me without bending it too much.”

John sucked air through his teeth. “That’s thoughtful. And weirdly sexy. But you know I can’t dive right in, right? We’ll need to relax you and that’ll take –”

Sherlock pulled his knees up, dug his heels into the edge of the bed, and thrust his bum toward John.

John stared at the clear glass loop seated neatly between his cheeks. “Oh, fuck.” He licked his lips. “What.” He stepped close and stuck two fingers through the ring. “What.”

“That’s not a question, John. But I wanted you inside me as soon as p- _aaahhh!_ ” His neck spasmed backward and he shouted as John gave the plug a quarter turn. “As soon as possible, so I made myself re- _ehhh!_ Ready. Pull it out and let’s go. Assuming you’re re- _EHHH!_ Ready too.”

“Sweet Jesus.” John tore off his shirt and dropped his trousers. “I’m ready.” His erection tented his boxers. “Lube’s in here?” he asked, moving toward the bedside table.

Sherlock caught his arm and steered him back to the foot of the bed. “Enough there already. Here, if you want more –” Sherlock spat forcefully into his left hand and half sat to reach up the leg of John’s boxers. He slicked the saliva over John’s shaft, mixing it with the wetness welling at the head. He worked the foreskin up and down. John squeezed his eyes shut and grasped at self-control.

Sherlock removed his hand, resumed his arse-offering position at the edge of the bed, and reached between his legs. He tugged on the plug handle and grunted as it popped out.

John looked.

This was not the tight little ring he had tentatively caressed a week ago.

His extremities went numb. He tipped his neck back and studied the ceiling. Mouth open and panting, he traced the longest crack in the plaster from end to end. He clenched and relaxed his fists. Clenched and relaxed.

“Please, John, what are you doing?” Sherlock begged. “Please, I want you inside me, please don’t make me wait. I _need_ you. _Please,_ John.”

John snapped to military attention, nodded smartly, and dropped his boxers. “You risk being too effective, love.” He stepped between Sherlock’s legs and put his left hand on his knee. He cupped Sherlock’s balls with his right hand, then trailed his fingers over Sherlock’s buttock and inward. Sherlock whimpered.

“The sight of your hard dick made my cock twitch.” He ran his index finger along the ridged ring of muscle. Sherlock squirmed.

“Seeing a glass handle sticking out of your arse made my balls tighten up.” He dipped two fingers in and swirled them around. Sherlock wasn’t kidding about the lube; he was slick. Sherlock writhed.

“And watching you pull that plug out, then seeing your gorgeous arsehole goddamn _gaping_ like this…” He inserted a third finger and pushed his hand forward. Sherlock gasped. “Fuck. It was a near thing, love. Almost came right then.”

“Please, John!” Sherlock ground himself against John’s fingers. His long toes gripped the edge of the mattress, straining. “In me! Please!”

John removed his fingers and gripped his cock. He guided himself into Sherlock’s well-stretched arse. With the cushions, the angle was exactly right. Sherlock’s muscles tightened around him and sent an electric thrill to his chest and balls. He stood motionless for two deep breaths, searching Sherlock’s face for any discomfort. “Alright?” he asked.

“Please?” Sherlock answered.

John pulled back slowly and pushed forward again.

“Yes,” Sherlock breathed, wriggling his hips and squeezing with his bum.

“Yes,” John agreed, pushing again.

He set up a steady but slow rhythm. He ran his hands over Sherlock’s long thighs and calves, up and down. Words abandoned him, but his breathing was eloquent.

Sherlock answered every thrust with one of his own. His baritone exclamations grew louder as his vocabulary dwindled into simple clarity: _So good. Please. John._ His long fingers clutched the bedclothes on either side of his makeshift riser, and the grey cuffs of the shirt he still wore slid along his wrists. His head tossed side to side, curls bouncing lazily with every movement.

John rubbed his right hand all the way along Sherlock’s inner thigh and seated the curve between his thumb and first finger near the base of Sherlock’s cock. It was waving and leaking in time with their motion. John curled his back and reached for it with his mouth but wasn’t flexible enough. Instead he followed Sherlock’s lead and spat downwards. It landed on the skin just right of the target, but John swept it up with his hand and slicked it over Sherlock.

“ _Yes,_ ” Sherlock gasped.

“Yes,” John agreed, pumping faster. He felt the urgency in his testicles that heralded orgasm, but he wasn’t ready yet. He spread his feet and stepped back slightly, then folded forward to lay himself on Sherlock’s chest, still moving at the hips. He reached for Sherlock’s head, and Sherlock rose up to meet his mouth. John squeezed and pulled on Sherlock’s dick between them.

Sherlock’s kisses were sloppy, unfocused, and punctuated with syllables: _Please. Yes. Ohh. John. John!_ His hands scratched John’s back, clutched his arse, pulled his short hair. He insinuated his left hand between their bodies and covered John’s pumping hand with his own. He guided them faster, harder.

John felt Sherlock pushing up through his legs, arching his back, and rocking his hips emphatically. His noises became a rising and falling ostinato of need.

John freed both hands to push himself back up. Sherlock’s hand closed around his own pink cock and worked it desperately. John lifted one of Sherlock’s ankles and then the other to his shoulders and Sherlock’s moans grew louder. John steadied himself, wrapped his left arm firmly around Sherlock’s thigh, and slammed forward. His balls slapped Sherlock’s arse. Sherlock’s moan broke in his throat.

John covered Sherlock’s hand and cock with his right hand and surrendered himself to the sensations of thrusting and pumping and combusting. Sherlock’s hand trembled as he began to ejaculate. John forced his eyes open to watch. The long tendons of Sherlock’s neck were gloriously exposed and tense, and his lush lips worked soundlessly, _oh, oh._ Semen dripped down the back of John’s hand.

Sherlock’s anal muscles contracted and John shouted. His orgasm blazed through his body and he drove into Sherlock with splintering release.

He gradually gentled and slowed his thrusting. He unfolded Sherlock’s legs from his shoulders, kissing each foot before replacing it on the bed.

Sherlock was still, one arm flung above his head, the other resting on his hip near his cock. He watched John with wide eyes, chest heaving.

“Alright?” John asked.

Sherlock’s light eyes searched his face. It was the _cataloguing_ look. A smile played at the edges of his full lips. “Please?” he answered. He squeezed John’s sensitised cock gently with his bum.

John spasmed and then laughed. “You’re crackers. Gorgeous. Fucking perfect. _Mine._ ” He lowered himself back down onto Sherlock’s chest and climbed onto the bed. Sherlock made a sound of loss when John’s cock popped free.

They kissed and caressed with loose, sated limbs. John buried his fingers in Sherlock’s sweat-damp curls. Sherlock kissed John’s nose, cheeks, and eyelids.

John proved to have a lower tolerance for the stickiness cooling between them, and he rolled off to fetch a flannel. _I love you,_ Sherlock mouthed at his retreating back.

When John returned, Sherlock was fingering his own arse with a look of sleepy bliss, playing with the come leaking onto his skin and the blanket. “God, you’re a vision,” John said. “A hundred percent worth the laundry; that duvet’s going to be its own load. Here, clean yourself up." He pressed the flannel into Sherlock’s hand and another kiss to those pretty, pretty lips.

~~~

Saturday’s dinner with Harry and Demi was more successful than anyone had a right to expect for a double date that was twenty-five percent Sherlock Holmes. He ordered sparkling water instead of the malbec John anticipated, but scoffed at the idea that it had anything to do with Harry when John mentioned it later. Still, when the dessert cart came round, he was the first to eye the Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte suspiciously, inquire about the ingredients, and remonstrate with the waiter when he revealed that the restaurant’s signature twist on the traditional gateau was strawberry syrup. Harry beamed at John and kicked him under the table.

 

On Tuesday evening Lestrade came to their door. John answered and looked to Sherlock, who paused in his sonata to say, “No urgency to him, John, and fiddling with a pack of cigarettes in his pocket. He’s here for you and he wants to get a pint.”

“You’re welcome, too,” the DI said to Sherlock.

“Not really my area.” Sherlock resumed playing briefly, then stopped. “But thank you for the invitation.”

Greg was momentarily thrown by the nicety. He shook it off. “Care to, then?” he asked John.

“Sure. Later, Sherlock?”

Sherlock nod-bowed in time with the music.

 

“So how’s the knee?” Greg asked.

“Good as new. Well, good as nearly forty.”

“Good, good. So. You and Sherlock are both officially my colleagues now.”

“Getting paid and everything. Weird. ‘Course he leaves the paperwork to me.”

They chatted about football and last night’s telly, and then Greg got to it. “Listen, John, I’m really sorry about that phone call. When I said Sherlock was a fake. I didn’t know what else to do, but I feel awful.”

John waved it away. “Forget it. You needed to. And you apologised in hospital and sent me Scotch.” John smiled. “And Sherlock’s alive. That’d absolve far worse.”

Greg nodded.

Uncertain what to say next, they both drank longer than they might’ve otherwise.

“It was for your safety.”

“Greg, it’s fine.”

“I called Mycroft as soon as you hung up. I didn’t know –”

“Shut up! We’re done. Mates. Please.”

“Alright, in that case, want to tell me about him? Mate?”

John grinned. “Tell you what?”

“How you’re finally together?”

“We’ve always been together.”

“But not like that.”

“Mmm. Like what?”

“Are you putting me on? Romantically. A couple. I was sure…”

“Haven’t I always told you I’m not gay?”

Greg wrinkled his forehead. “Oh. Yeah. I just thought…”

John smiled into his glass. “Turns out that’s not entirely true.”

Greg beamed his big white smile. He raised his glass and waited for John to clink it before he drank again.

 

Molly sent a bouquet of sunflowers. The card said, “Just like having friends. (Only not really.) Used to it yet? XOXO, Molly.” Sherlock rolled his eyes and tried not to look too touched.

 

Mycroft was unconscionably smug for a month. Mrs Hudson swatted him with a tea towel and told him it wasn’t his doing.

 

When Sherlock and John hosted their first dinner party as a couple, Greg went looking for a bottle opener in a kitchen drawer. Instead he found the wedding band Sherlock had worn with his disguises, which hadn’t made its way back to Mycroft after all. He got entirely the wrong idea.

(At least for now, John thought later.) (All in the timing, Sherlock mused.)

“Sweet John in a jumper!” Greg exclaimed.

For a moment, the stunned silence was complete. All eyes locked on Greg.

He bit his lip. Mycroft gave a discreet snort. Sherlock twitched with a breathy, soundless laughter. Molly and Mrs Hudson pretended, poorly, that nothing was funny.

John looked from one face to the next, deciding whether the laugh was at his expense or Greg’s, and tugged on his jumper. Smoothed it out so it hung well.

Greg ruffled his silver hair. “It’s just… something I think to myself sometimes. My sister told me to quit taking the Lord’s name in vain in front of my nieces, so... Erm, sorry, John.”

Sherlock told Greg to give the ring back to Mycroft.

Everyone saw, but only Sherlock observed, how Mycroft coloured when Greg put it in his hand.

 

After the guests had gone and the leftovers were packed away, John went up to the attic bedroom and came down with a wrapped package. “I got you something, Sherlock. No reason. Just because.”

Sherlock took it, already marshalling his involuntary smiling muscles. The size, shape, and heft of it clearly indicated _framed photo._

He’d deduced John’s plan a week ago, when Stamford emailed them the pictures from his daughter’s baptism. The one of Sherlock and John smiling in front of the weathered oak and wrought iron church door was well-composed and flattering – objectively excellent, really – but that was irrelevant. No matter how commandingly handsome John looked in his dark suit, self-portraits on the walls were the vilest form of sentiment and narcissism. At a religious institution, no less! Sherlock casually made his feelings on the matter known, giving John ample opportunity to rethink his plan. It seemed he had deliberately ignored the suggestion.

Now Sherlock was in the noxious position of either lying about his feelings or disappointing John with his reaction to the gift. It was unkind, really. He hoped his flared nostrils seemed like a natural part of the smile.

John was grinning merrily. “Just open it.”

Sherlock tore off the plain brown paper. “Oh, a picture!” he said, falsely bright, as he uncovered the frame.

It was not John and Sherlock at church.

It was a medical image of a human heart, an angiogram with some kind of additional colour processing. The venous structures were richly rendered in shades of grey. Wide white coronary arteries arced along either side, and a fine mesh of pale veins snaked everywhere like an aerial of a river delta. The muscle of the heart was dove-grey against the inky background. The white mount and black frame made a striking presentation.

The image quality was truly excellent; Sherlock deduced that it was a very recent work. He turned it over looking for a date.

The inscription on the back read:

_SH –_

_Mine. Always yours._

_– JW_

Tears pricked his eyes. _Tears, why? I am quite pleased with this!_

John gave a little chuckle. “I thought you might like it if I wrote that in blood, but apparently archival pen lasts longer.”

Sherlock pursed his lips. “The inscription is ambiguous, though. It’s not clear if you mean I’m yours and you’re always mine, or if you mean this is actually your heart, and it is metaphorically mine.” He looked to John for clarification.

John’s fond, exasperated face said _deduce it, you great prat._

“Ah. Both, of course. I do hope this wasn’t a discretionary procedure. People have allergic reactions to the dye, you know, and the risk of heart attack or stroke is not negligible, I believe it’s five in –”

“Sherlock,” John interrupted him. “Do. You. Like it.” It was a prompt rather than a question.

The self-deduction was involuntary and immediate: _I am a difficult man to love._

Sherlock Holmes had a long memory and a few friends. So it was not hyperbole when he said, “This is the finest gift anyone has ever given me.”

He ghosted his fingers across the image, then laid his hand on John’s chest, over his heart. “I do not deserve it. I fear I may never. But I will try. All my days, I will try.”

And _that_ was the finest gift anyone had ever given John Watson.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _[beautiful heart](http://www.nationalgeographic.com/wallpaper/science/photos/heart/heart-angiogram/) _
> 
> _I did it! I finished this baby before S3 aired! Phew. Thank you for welcoming me into this fantastic fandom, reading what I wrote (!!), and sharing your thoughts. To borrow a phrase for how I’m feeling: Oh, it’s Christmas! It is, isn’t it. :) Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and here’s to lots more slashy fun to come!_


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